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From Peru to Starbucks’ ‘Liquid Lab’: How pumpkins became a seasonal icon
People have been cultivating pumpkins for thousands of years, but their involvement in Americas fall festivities has a much more limited history. Like all good rags-to-riches stories, the humble pumpkins begins in 19th-century Ireland sort of and features a host of characters, from bonfire-lighting druids to multinational coffee conglomerates.
As fall approaches, several brands have already started gearing up for a pumpkin-spiced season. It may come as a surprise to learn that Starbucks famous Pumpkin Spice Latte �an important checkpoint in pumpkins rise to their current lofty heights �doesnt actually contain any pumpkin. Thats the point: its spiced to taste like pumpkin. Well, it was a surprise to me. Now, hold onto your gourds, and join us for a brief history of pumpkins.
Gourds have been cultivated in South America for 13,000 years
Most pumpkin varieties have roots in North America. People cultivated pumpkins in what is now Mexico at least as far back as 5,500 BCE, according to the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources. They might even have been growing them 1,500 years before that.
But gourds �of which pumpkins are a rare, edible example �may have been one of the very first domesticated crops. Older than beans, older than maize. People in Asia and Africa may have been growing gourds even earlier, but the earliest concrete evidence of gourd cultivation is in Peru, from about 11,000 BCE.
Classic pumpkins are North American, and its the Connecticut Field pumpkin we all recognize as the archetype: something like Platos form. Americas indigenous populations were eating pumpkins long before Europeans arrived in the New World.�
English colonists first came across them in the 17th century and followed suit. But not with great enthusiasm, apparently. Fox cites Cindy Ott, Professor of History and Museum Studies at the University of Delaware, as describing it as a food of last resort.
The pumpkins role in ritual
In Ireland, people told myths of roving spirits. They were still doing so up until the 19th century, but these traditions had been around for centuries before then. Samhain, or O�che Shamhna, is a Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the darker half of the year.
There are, or were, equivalent festivals in other Celtic nations. Samhain was a liminal festival, marking a threshold between two distinct parts of the year. The boundary between this world and the Otherworld blurred, and this made contact with spirits more likely.
People appeased the spirits with offerings of food and drink, while the souls of dead kin revisited their homes seeking hospitality.�
Traditionally, children would carve scary faces into turnips and march them around the villages and land in order to ward away the spirits. Theyd leave them on the peripheries of their homes during the festive period to keep them safe.
These turnip lanterns were the precursor to todays jack-o-lanterns. Before that particular transition was possible, the pagan tradition of Samhain merged with Christianitys All Souls Day. This happened around the 9th century more than 1,000 years ago �but folklorists continued to use the name Samhain to refer to Gaelic Halloween celebrations until as recently as the 19th century.�
Samhain and All Souls Day influenced each other, and in turn, helped form what we now know as Halloween. Most American Halloween traditions are inherited from Irish and Scottish immigrants, so the next step on our journey is to bring together Celtic paganism, British imperialism, and American agriculture.
Pumpkins make great lanterns
Because of their thick skins and distinctive orange coloration, Connecticut Field pumpkins make perfect jack-o-lanterns.
Plus, theyre edible, unlike many other types of gourd.
So, when British colonizers sailed the Atlantic and alighted on American shores, they brought with them Gaelic Irish and Scottish customs. Lacking turnips, or finding pumpkins preferable��theyre tasty, after all �they adopted them. They sunk in their carving knives, and the rest, as they say, is history.
When Peter Dukes, product manager in Starbucks espresso division, was tasked with developing a recipe for a new festive beverage in 2003, he and his R&D team settled into the Liquid Lab and brainstormed flavors, according to Bustles telling of it.�
They whittled 20 down to four, mocked up prototypes, and submitted their ideas for approval. Eventually, they got the go-ahead �as lore has it, they gathered together and ate pumpkin pie while drinking espresso in order to nail the flavor. By and by, the team chose Pumpkin Spice Latte as the appropriate name for their new fall cuppa: pumpkin spice because its spiced in order to taste like pumpkin.
