Photo courtesy of the author.
by Natalie “Lee” Arneson
While there are many delicious Fall desserts and drinks that incorporate pumpkin, such as the classic pumpkin pie and the well-known Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks, a favorite in my house is pumpkin bread. My mother’s pumpkin bread is a staple come October, but I began to wonder where it came from. When it was first made? While I (in extreme bias) believe my mother’s is the best pumpkin bread, I’m not naive enough to believe she’s the creator of this particular baked good.
I suppose a good place to start when discovering where pumpkin bread comes from is to figure out where the pumpkins themselves originate. According to a PBS Food article published on November 25, 2014, titled “History of Pumpkins and Recipe Round-Up,” author Tori Avey states that, “Archaeologists discovered the oldest domesticated pumpkin seeds in the Oaxaca Highlands of Mexico.” These seeds were believed to be from 10,000 years ago, preceding domesticated corn or beans. In the article “Native Food: Pumpkin Bread” written by Dale Carson, an Abenaki author, on Indian Country Today, fragments of pumpkins, such as pieces of stems and seeds “have been recovered from the ruins of cliff dwellers in what is now the southwestern United States.” “[B]y 2500 B.C. Native Americans in the Southwest were cultivating corn, beans and squash on farms,” states Lorraine Boissoneault in their Nov. 5, 2018 Smithsonian article, “How the Formerly Ubiquitous Pumpkin Became a Thanksgiving Treat.” Pumpkin proved to be a versatile squash, many Indigenous peoples discovered a plethora of ways to cook pumpkin—roasting, stewing, drying—as well as using the hollowed out gourd as a means of storage.
While it’s indisputable that pumpkins themselves are a crop indigeonous to Central and North America, pinpointing the origin of pumpkin bread proved more difficult. There are a multitude of recipes for pumpkin bread from all across the country, and in different parts of the world, but no one can seem to find the answer to the question; where does pumpkin bread come from? While searching for the answers I came across a wide-range of pumpkin bread recipes, one from Pennsylvania in the 1950s and another from an English periodical dating back to the 18th century. In the end, I still found no definitive answer. In retrospect, the recipe has probably evolved so much since its beginning that it’s unlikely that I was ever going to find the first recorded recipe of pumpkin bread. Even my mother’s pumpkin bread recipe isn’t originally her own (though she did put her name to it once she made it gluten free with her own homemade gluten free flour blend). After talking with my mom, I learned that she originally got the recipe from a coworker of my father’s back in the 90s. It was that coworker’s mother’s recipe (she was a chef in Seattle, WA at the time) and then it found its way down to Portland, OR; another way in which pumpkin bread has travelled and evolved. I hope you enjoy this well-loved recipe as much as my family. Happy baking!
Pumpkin Bread Recipe (As Written by Maria Arneson):
Ingredients:
2 c. sugar
1 c. oil
4 eggs
2 c. pumpkin
¼ t. salt
2 t. baking soda
2 c. flour
2 t. baking powder
2 t. cinnamon
1 c. pecans (optional)
Baking:
Cream top four ingredients. Mix dry ingredients & add to the creamed mixture. Add nuts. Pour in two greased & floured pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes.
