Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon by Cindy Ott (review)

From food of the poor to the essential dessert at one of America’s most inclusive holidays, Ott uses the pumpkin to illustrate the way that culture and commodities influence each reciprocally over time. Pumpkins and squash were undifferentiated in the colonial era and were valued because they were easy to grow, high-yielding, and hardy. While some forms of squash were sold in limited quantities at market, there was little economic value to selling pumpkins because all classes grew it on marginal land for supplementing their diets and as animal fodder. Initially, the pumpkin was seen as a lower class food by colonists while most Europeans viewed its large size and wild growth as a symbol of an America that was on the “edge of civilization” (24-5).

Ott explains that the pumpkin’s meaning was ambiguous until it shifted for the first time in 1796 with Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery. Ott says this was the “beginning of the transformation of the pumpkin from uninspired side dish into glorified dessert,” and this culinary shift lead by women in the household helped to elevate the pumpkin into a cultural icon (52). While Ott does not discuss women’s contribution to the creation of this American symbol in length, it appears this culinary shift was critical in elevating the orange pumpkin above other forms of squash. While there are no botanical differences between squash and pumpkin, the two became divorced as the pumpkin came to represent more than just an everyday food item. The pumpkin came to represent hard-work, independence, and the values of agrarian life and thus became synonymous with New England. Ott argues that the South was less receptive to adopt the pumpkin because plantations embraced capitalist production, therefore, Southern identity was not as receptive to agrarian ideals of small farmers that emanated out of New England. Elevating the pumpkin to a dessert was a crucial change because it disassociated many of the previous negative images of the pumpkin and made it into a proud symbol of New England, and eventually the entire United States, but the transition from regional to national symbol and its adoption in other regions of the country is still obscured.

The pumpkin was empowered as a symbol of America because it was a “democratic” food that all classes easily produced regardless of wealth or status and thus, “embodied the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal of a nation of self-sufficient farmers” (55). Precisely because it lacked economic value, the pumpkin was transformed into a symbol of American rusticity and simplicity as opposed to the sophisticated and pretentious Europeans from which America was forming their identity in distinction to (44). In the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln created Thanksgiving in an effort to “reinvent” the nation, and Ott says this made the pastoral harvest and pumpkin the “central symbol of Thanksgiving” and “America made nature a building block of their heritage, not a substitute for it. They began to think of nature as a repository of native, homegrown traditions and an icon of the nation’s ancestral roots” (100). The pumpkin thus became a tangible symbol of “authentic” American roots that could be found in the natural world. Ott also attempts to explain how the pumpkin became associated with Halloween in the form of the jack-o’-lantern, connecting the two to the pastoral harvest, however, the importance of the pumpkin to the meaning of Halloween and American identity is questionable.

The search for native roots to undergird American identity dovetailed in the late 19^th century with America’s transformation into an increasingly urban, industrial, and “modern” society. The myth of an idyllic, agrarian past communicated through the cultural icon of the pumpkin helped mitigate the effects of the transformation into this urban, industrial nation. The pumpkin’s historic lack of economic value suited it perfectly as a symbol of a precapitalist, agrarian past, and as the pumpkin gained cultural weight as...