A Slice of History: How Pumpkin Pie Became a Thanksgiving Tradition

Turkey may occupy the center of the Thanksgiving table, but when dinner is over, another familiar ingredient takes its turn in the spotlight.

Pumpkin.

More specifically, pumpkin pie.

For many Americans, Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie would feel strangely incomplete. The dessert is so closely associated with the holiday that it's tempting to imagine Americans have been eating the same familiar slices since the earliest Thanksgiving celebrations.

The real history is considerably more complicated—and more interesting.

Today's pumpkin pie represents the meeting of ingredients and culinary traditions from different parts of the world.

And it took generations for the dessert to become the Thanksgiving institution we know today.

Pumpkins Before Pumpkin Pie

Pumpkins and other squash are native to the Americas and were cultivated by Indigenous peoples long before Europeans arrived.

European settlers encountered these crops and found numerous ways to prepare them.

But the pumpkin dishes eaten in early colonial America weren't necessarily the smooth custard pies we recognize today.

Pumpkin could be boiled, stewed, roasted, or combined with milk, spices, and sweeteners. Cooking techniques brought from Europe were adapted to ingredients available in North America.

The idea of enclosing sweet or savory fillings in pastry, meanwhile, had a long history in Europe.

Eventually, those culinary worlds came together.

Building the American Pumpkin Pie

As American cooking developed, recipes combining pumpkin with eggs, milk, sugar, and spices became increasingly familiar.

Cookbooks helped standardize recipes and spread them between households.

One particularly important figure in early American culinary history was Amelia Simmons, whose 1796 cookbook American Cookery is widely recognized as the first known cookbook written by an American and published in the United States.

It included recipes for pumpkin preparations in pastry, demonstrating that something recognizable as pumpkin pie had already found a place in American cooking by the end of the 18th century.

The dessert continued evolving from there.

Thanksgiving Finds Its Dessert

Thanksgiving itself also evolved.

Different communities observed days of thanksgiving long before the holiday became standardized nationally. During the 19th century, Thanksgiving increasingly developed the family-centered food traditions we recognize today.

Pumpkin pie fit naturally into that autumn celebration.

Pumpkins were associated with the harvest, and pie was already a familiar part of American cooking.

By the time Thanksgiving became firmly established as a national tradition, pumpkin pie had become one of the foods most closely associated with it.

Today, the pairing seems inevitable.

But it represents centuries of agriculture, migration, adaptation, and changing traditions.

That's quite a history for one slice of pie.