Pumpkin and pumpkin pie

Plimoth Patuxet Museums says pumpkin “was very likely on the harvest table in some form, but not as pumpkin pie”. Pumpkins and other squashes were native to New England, and some kinds had reached Europe by 1500, but New Plymouth probably lacked the butter and wheat flour to make pie crust in 1621. Kathleen Wall, the museum’s foodways culinarian, told Smithsonian magazine that the missing pastry would have been “a blank in the table, for an English eye”. The earliest written recipes that came after 1621 treated pumpkins more like apples, slicing them and sometimes frying the slices.

By the end of the eighteenth century the custard pie existed. Amelia Simmons gives two versions: one of a quart of stewed and strained pumpkin with three pints of cream, nine eggs, sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger, laid into pastry and baked for three quarters of an hour; the other plainer, with milk, molasses, allspice and ginger in a crust.

In New England the pie became part of the holiday itself. Sarah Josepha Hale’s novel Northwood (1827) describes a farmhouse Thanksgiving where the chicken pie is, “like the celebrated pumpkin pie, an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving”; among the puddings, custards and “pies of every name and description ever known in Yankee land”, “the pumpkin pie occupied the most distinguished niche”. Plimoth Patuxet counts the book among the earliest descriptions of the Thanksgiving table. Hale, who became editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1837, used it to campaign for Thanksgiving as a national holiday, petitioning governors and presidents (Thanksgiving symbols).