Cindy Ott’s private collection
We prefer them round, lightly ridged, deeply orange, with a satisfying heft. Our affection is true, but seasonal—we are fall-weather friends for the most part, bracketed by a display in late October and a pie in late November.
Is that it for the pumpkin’s appeal?
Hardly, says Cindy Ott, author of the engaging Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon (University of Washington Press). Her readers learn of a paradox: Historically, as pumpkins declined in utility, they rose in symbolic capital. “Nearly two hundred years have passed since the pumpkin last played a role in everyday American life,” writes the author, an assistant professor of American studies at Saint Louis University. “Yet its outsized physical presence inspires deep human attachments.”
According to Ott, we don’t know if pumpkins were eaten at that famed feast of Pilgrim and Indian at Plymouth. The original sources don’t record it. She thinks the pumpkin “gate-crashed the Pilgrims’ fête” centuries after the fact. But there is no doubt that colonists, especially in New England, came to embrace the indigenous staple. “We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon / If it was not for pumpkin, we should be undone,” went a colonial song. The pumpkin was a reliable hedge against hunger. It grew like a weed, so prolific that a single vine could produce hundreds of pounds of pumpkins. It stored well for winter, and even in the pre-pie days, it could be palatable, if not enticing. “For most of the colonial period,” says Ott, “people dreamed of oranges but fed on pumpkins.”
Europe gave the name pumpkin to the fruit, after pompion in French. But it also offered its ambivalence and disdain. Very early on in the colonial era, Europeans seized on the pumpkin as the emblem for North America’s natural wonders, what one early 17th-century Englishman called the continent’s “rude garden.” The pumpkin symbolized both the New World’s natural wonders, and “its perceived primitiveness,” Ott writes, “because the pumpkin was prolific, unwieldy, and used by Indians.”
Yet as Americans began to carve their own identities, Ott writes, distinct from the English, they grew proud of their hardscrabble survival and identified with the pumpkin, unruly and unwilling to stay confined to its patch.
Still, the pumpkin declined as a staple. Less than 50 years after Plymouth, a poem entitled “New England’s Crisis” could be nostalgic about “The Times wherein old Pompion was a Saint” and when cinmels, another word for pumpkins and squashes, “were accounted noble blood.”
By the 19th century, the pumpkin was used mainly for animal fodder. What revived it as human foodstuff was the pie, gussying up what had been modest fare. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796) was the first cookbook published in the United States, says Ott, and “self-consciously an indigenous and patriotic American text, although one with a New England bias.” Simmons included two recipes now recognizable as pumpkin pies, one on the simple side, and one with nine eggs and three pints of cream.
Pumpkins and politics continued to intertwine.
“Some of the most strident critics of slavery were also some of the most prolific writers of pumpkin tales,” writes Ott. “What bound pumpkins to abolitionism was the political economy.” In championing the pumpkin, writers like John Greenleaf Whittier, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Lydia Maria Child championed the values of the small New England farm against the large Southern plantation.
By the late 1890s, at least one American found it hard to overstate the probity of the pumpkin pie. “When properly made,” (isn’t that qualifier delicious?) “the pumpkin pie is the embodiment, so to speak, of peace on earth and good will toward men,” wrote an anonymous author in the Kansas City Journal who enlisted the pastry as a weapon against anarchists. “No man ever plotted treason or formulated dark damnable designs while filling his system with a genuine New England pumpkin pie.”
Agriculturally the pumpkin was more controversial. The crop was marginal and virtually worthless. By the end of the 19th century, Ott notes, the value of pumpkins to farmers was about a tenth of a cent per pound. In contrast, a pound of rice brought seven cents.
“We could wish that we had seen the last of them,” wrote a commentator in an 1870 issue of The Horticulturalist. “It is about time that pumpkins were retired from service and entered upon the fossil list.” Yet even as they advocated a petrified pumpkin, agricultural publications, seed catalogs, and the like featured the fruit prominently on their pages. The orbs’ optimism and playfulness was too good to ignore.
This reflected a wider societal shift. Many Americans, Ott writes, “celebrated the pumpkin for the very reasons that made it a ‘fossil’” for agriculture. In the wake of industrialization and its concomitant anxieties, 19th-century middle-class Americans sought to rekindle a romance with nature and the countryside. “The pumpkin helped them to rebuild those connections.” That romance also involved playing with pumpkins. Ott traces the rise of the pumpkin as Halloween decoration, especially in its scary guise as a jack-o'-lantern: In many early incarnations, the jack-o'-lantern was depicted with a body beneath its “head” that allowed it to chase children, dance with devils, and seduce the innocent, among other merriment.
This pumpkin pastoral would continue into the 20th century. Late in the New Deal, Farm Security Administration photographers were encouraged to find more optimistic images than the impoverished rural folk of the Depression. “Please watch for autumn pictures ... cornfields, pumpkins,” a directive from the agency’s chief read in 1941. “Emphasize the idea of abundance—the ‘horn of plenty’ and pour maple syrup over it.” The photographers complied, Ott notes, creating a series of photographs of roadside stands overflowing with pumpkins and other produce.
That sheer abundance of pumpkins continues the romance today. Ott spotlights farmers who seasonally turn their farms and fields into pumpkin playgrounds where families can choose their wannabe jack-o'-lanterns, pet the odd goat, and otherwise commune with the rural. She talked too to officials who have revitalized their small towns with pumpkin shows and festivals, often featuring mammoth pumpkins that have a subculture of growers all to themselves.
Incidentally, after smashing our illusions about the Pilgrims, Ott continues her pumpkin iconoclasm. Libby’s is a leading manufacturer of pumpkin-pie filling. But its pumpkin, Libby’s Select, is oblong, and of a muddy beige color. It’s bred for pie filling, not presentation. In truth it suggests a squash, she says, but is called a pumpkin for obvious reasons. The difference is cultural not botanical. In contrast, Ott says, pumpkins bred to impress pumpkin-picking hordes are often “mere façades,” containing infertile seeds and inedible flesh. The pumpkin as symbol comes full circle.
