A small child, no older than seven, stumbles through a pumpkin patch on a blistery October afternoon, tripping over winding vines and crunching browning leaves under thick-soled boots too heavy for a human of that size. Their parent wraps mitten-swathed hands around a mug with the words “hey pumpkin, happy fall!” scripted on the outside. The air, that chilly fall air that brims with Halloween spookiness and Thanksgiving gratitude, makes that child believe they can pick up a bright orange vegetable they can barely wrap their arms around. The parent grins at the child and the trophy whose slimy veins they will blend into a puree and carved-out carcass they will place on their front porch for all their neighbors to see.
The pumpkin’s allure lies in its whimsical and multifaceted history. It is not an idle symbol of changing seasons; it is a dynamic canvas on which Americans may project their vision of comfort and reflect on the feeling of transformation that comes with the waning summer warmth. For centuries in the United States, we have cooked it, carved it, traded it, told tales about it and migrated with it: the pumpkin’s physical form is a vital vertebra in the backbone of American popular culture.
Other crops have illustrious histories, such as the apple, potato or banana, but what sets the pumpkin apart is that it has lost almost all of its functional use. We eat it because it’s a fun way to repurpose its remains after we chuck out its guts and carve out chunks of its meat to make eyeballs and crooked smiles. The pumpkin looms large in the fall but is otherwise no longer a foundation of everyday American life.
So what are the roots of this seasonal celebrity?
Pumpkins can trace their origins in North America back to as early as 3500 B.C., making them one of the oldest crops of the western hemisphere. Native Americans roasted pumpkin meat on the fire for sustenance and are said to have even woven pumpkin skin into mats.
Once colonialism struck the Americas around the 15th century, it is said that colonizers relied heavily on the pumpkin as a food source. They prepared them by slicing off their tops, removing the seeds (sound familiar?), and filling the inside with milk and spices to create the earliest traces of our modern pumpkin pie.
At this point, you may be wondering how this functional vegetable became the basis of the peculiar Halloween jack-o’-lanterns we love. Well, this history says as much about our perception of wild nature as it does human nature. The story starts in Ireland where people carved faces into small turnips to ward off spirits. With immigration into the Americas came the assimilation of this tradition into western culture: white colonizers swapped turnips for pumpkins and the jack-o’-lantern tradition stuck.
Having both ornamental and culinary value, the pumpkin took hold of American life early, and our obsession swelled so intensely that American writers wrote effusive poetry and prose about it. These writings lifted the pumpkin up as a symbol of early, small-town, agrarian life in America. But let’s just say not everyone buys into this idyllic vision.
For many African Americans, fall means stuffing the oven with a decadent sweet potato pie (or warming up a pre-made Patti LaBelle pie from the store if cooking happens not to be the individual’s forte). The running joke that “Black people don’t eat pumpkin pie” traces back to the Antebellum South.
Southern culinary customs more often turned to sweet potatoes than pumpkins for their spice-filled pies simply because they were easier to grow in their agricultural environment. This task was usually delegated to enslaved African Americans working in the plantation house kitchen. This is not exactly where the tradition stakes its roots, however. It all began in the slave quarters, which is where enslaved people could establish their own sense of domesticity and claim space within the context of home. The first African American sweet potato dessert was a sweet potato roasted on a fire, and the glossy finish on the outside sparked the evolution of the “candied” dessert. After Emancipation, Black people held on to their perfected recipes and carried them across the country far and wide.
Sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie may be rivals for the crown of the most fall-ish fall dessert, puffing out their chests in competition, but in the end, all of these traditions represent how we, as Americans, cling to what we believe is our history, our national identity. Every year we carve our jack-o’-lanterns and bake our pies—sweet potato and pumpkin alike—as a way of nuzzling into the changing season and reminding ourselves of all the memories entwined in festive fun.