A sign for Taco Casa advertising pumpkin spice tacos in College Station, Texas
27 October 2021
Pumpkin spice, or pumpkin pie spice, has no actual pumpkin (cf., pumpkin). It is a mix of common spices—cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and allspice being a typical combination—that was originally intended for flavoring pumpkin pies. Home-mixed combinations of spices like this probably go back to the first pumpkin pies, but pumpkin spice mix began being marketed as a product in the early twentieth century.
A couple of advertisements from Indiana in the fall of 1931 show two different brands of pumpkin spice mix on the market. The first, manufactured by Kothe, Wells, & Bauer Co. of Indianapolis and sold under the name pumpkin pie spice, appears in an advertisement in the Indianapolis News on 23 October 1931:
This week-end many grocers are offering a special low price on a can of KO-WE-BA Dry-Pack Fancy Pumpkin, and a package of KO-WE-BA Pumpkin Pie Spice.
And a few weeks later, we see a different brand being advertised as just pumpkin spice. From an advertisement in the Muncie Morning Star of 14 November 1931.
Yes, Pumpkins
Are Pumpkins
but the ones grown for Delicious Pumpkin Pies are different. Buy a can of
Delicious Pumpkin
and a package of
T&T
Pumpkin Spice
One can makes 2 large or 3 medium pies
But the pumpkin spice craze, where it seems that every sort of foodstuff is marketed with a pumpkin-spice-flavored variant would not get underway until the twenty-first century. Starbucks first tested its pumpkin spice latte on consumers in Vancouver and Washington, DC in the fall of 2002 and started serving the drink nationwide in 2003. But while Starbucks gets the credit for starting the pumpkin spice craze, it was not the first to sell a pumpkin spice latte. An article in Indiana’s Lafayette Journal and Courier of 6 October 2003 says that a local coffee shop had been selling pumpkin spice lattes since 2000:
As the days are turning colder, and Halloween and Thanksgiving are on the horizon, J.L. Hufford Coffee and Tea Co. offers a seasonal drink for this week’s Local Flavor.
Pumpkin Spice Latte has been offered at the shop for about three years, according to James Pappas, J.L. Hufford Coffee and Tea Co.
This particular recipe used Big Train Spiced Chai mix instead of regular pumpkin pie spice mix.
But it was after Starbucks launched its version of the spiced latte that the pumpkin spice craze became a reality. The Corpus of Historical American English records a 750% jump in the frequency of pumpkin spice between the decades of the 2000s and the 2010s.
Now it is impossible to get away from the stuff.
Sources:
Advertisement. Indianapolis News, 23 October 1931, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Advertisement. Muncie Morning Star (Indiana), 14 November 1931, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Chou, Jessica. “History of the Pumpkin Spice Latte.” The Daily Meal, 28 October 2013. https://www.thedailymeal.com/news/history-pumpkin-spice-latte/102813
Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Accessed 1 October 2021.
D’Costa Krystal. “The Rise of Pumpkin Spice.” Scientific American, 20 September 2017,
“Local Flavor: Area Chefs Share Their Favorite Recipes.” Lafayette Journal and Courier (Indiana), 6 October 2003, E1.
Image credit: David Wilton, 2018. Licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.