Pumpkin, pecan, apple — oh my: these seasonal favorites may surprise you

It’s time for a specific flavor palate: rich, sugary, and preferably served in a pastry shell. In other words, pie time! Here’s where our most popular autumn pies came from.

Pumpkin pie

History.com says pumpkins originated in Central America and traveled to Europe with returning explorers in 1536, where the English promptly wrapped them in pie crust. Colonists brought pumpkin recipes to New England, but those looked much different than they do now; some layered pumpkin, apple, rosemary, marjoram and thyme in a pie crust, others just filled the whole pumpkin with sweetened milk and plopped it in a fire to cook. By the Civil War, pumpkin pie reached its modern custard form and achieved national fame.

Today, the easiest way to make a pumpkin pie is with a can of Libby’s, who started their line of canned pumpkin in 1929 and made Morton, Illinois, the Pumpkin Capitol of the World. Although, Libby’s special “Dickinson” pumpkin strain is more closely related to butternut squash.

Pumpkin pie is also synonymous with the pumpkin pie spice blend and its takeover of all food from September to Thanksgiving. Is it overused? Yes. Do I care? Nope.

Pecan pie

According to travel and gastronomy source Eater, pecans are another indigenous American food. They were propagated by native people as far north as Iowa and thrived along the Mississippi River. The English word “pecan” comes from the French “pacane,” which was most likely adopted from the Algonquin word for “nut.”

The pecan pie originated in Texas after the Civil War and sometimes included milk or raisins. It stayed in Texas until the mid-1920s when the Corn Products Refining Company began printing pecan pie recipes on their Karo corn syrup bottles. The pecan pie exploded in popularity and even today most recipes call for Karo. (Unless one wants a healthy pecan pie, which is an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one.)

Apple pie

Apple pie is American to the core — meaning it was invented in England with fruit from Kazakstan and spices from Indonesia, but the Colonies had better marketing.

Culinary think tank Food52 pegs the first apple pie recipe as a 14th-century English cookbook. Most pies were savory at the time, but fruit pastries were a sweet exception. Apple trees and apple pies migrated to the New World along with settlers and remained massively popular. The phrase “as American as apple pie” first appeared in the 1920s, and that reputation was solidified during WWII when apple pie also picked up connotations of nostalgia, patriotism, and mid-century American values.

Modern discourse realizes regarding apple pie as strictly American ignores its rich international history and undermines the reality of the American experience. As John Lehndorff of the American Pie Council put it, “When you say that something is ‘as American as apple pie,’ what you’re really saying is that the item came to this country from elsewhere and was transformed into a distinctly American experience.”

Samantha Tucker is a staff writer at the Daily American Republic. She can be reached at stucker.dar@gmail.com.