Pumpkin Pie Research Paper

Words: 737
Pages: 3

When Thanksgiving arrives every year in November, the minds of America turns towards many iconic foods, including turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and dozens of other holiday specialties. One of the most associated foods with this holiday is pumpkin pie. This food, while popular in Canada and America, does not often appear in other parts of the world. The idea of pumpkin pie originated in the early 1600’s when Native Americans shared squash and pumpkins with early settlers. Due to the lack of cooking techniques, dishes originally were very different from pie. By the late 1700’s, a general recipe for pumpkin pie had been created, with ingredients similar to those used today. For a contemporary pumpkin pie made from scratch, these ingredients are needed: flour, some sort of shortening, pumpkin, milk, eggs, brown sugar, cinnamon, ground ginger, nutmeg, and salt. The filling is a combination of the eggs, brown sugar, milk, …show more content…
Due to its popularity, its growth around Asia, the Middle East and Europe quickly expanded, more so than the previous spices. It had both cooking and medicinal uses.
Nutmeg originated on the Banda Islands in Indonesia, the nut of the tree group Myristica. The spice was grown only on the islands until the mid-19th century. Europeans, being Europeans, took over the islands in 1621 to get a monopoly on the spice. The East India Trading Company led this. In the early 1800’s the British transplanted nutmeg to other parts of East Asia and India.
These basic ingredients for pumpkin pie show the vast diversity of food around the globe. Some ingredients, such as the spices nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger, show the value that humans place on food, and the lengths to which we go to obtain it. This exercise in discovering the origins of food shows the long history of globalization, helping us realize that creating connections around the globe is not a modern idea, but is rooted deep in our