What’s in the Thanksgiving pie? A lot of stories.

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Looking at how ingredients evolve in recipes over time tells us a lot about the people and places where the food was grown and consumed. It can also ...

Looking at how ingredients evolve in recipes over time tells us a lot about the people and places where the food was grown and consumed. It can also tell us a lot about the present.

Familiar recipes offer not only a sense of connection but also a form of time travel. Consider pumpkin. It first started appearing as a New World ingredient in English pie recipes in the 1600s. But the basic custard combination of pureed pumpkin, sugar, spices, eggs, and milk appears to have changed little since pumpkin pie appeared in the first American cookbook in 1796. A similar recipe can be found today printed on cans of Libby’s pumpkin in grocery stores.

Looking at how ingredients evolve in recipes over time tells us a lot about the people and places where the food was grown and consumed. It can also tell us a lot about the present.

So, for Thanksgiving this year, Monitor reporters and editors thought it would be interesting to explore the pumpkin pie, the holiday’s top dessert. (If you take umbrage with that characterization, check out the results of our pie poll on page 24.) We took a closer look at some of the pie’s ingredients – eggs, flour, pumpkin – to discover what stories they might hold.

Economics reporter Laurent Belsie raised his hand to investigate eggs, and found that some people who started keeping chickens when egg prices skyrocketed have become attached to raising their own food. (Even as they become more familiar with the occasional hassles of backyard birds.)

Elsewhere, California bureau chief Cindy Carcamo visited a family who was inspired by a pie-shaped piece of land to grow heritage wheat and build a mill to process it into flour – part of a nationwide shift toward local grains. And I took a trip far beyond New England, where European settlers first encountered “pompions,” to the place that produces most of the world’s canned pumpkin today: Illinois.

Pies, savory and sweet, have long been at the heart of Anglo-American cooking – an original comfort food, explain…

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