Pumpkin Pie

The filling is cooked pumpkin mixed with eggs, milk or cream, sugar and spices such as cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves, baked in a single crust until set.

Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796) gives two “Pompkin” recipes. The first lays a mixture of stewed pumpkin, cream, eggs, sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger into pastry and crosses it with a lattice. The second uses milk, pumpkin, eggs, molasses, allspice and ginger. According to Wikipedia, pumpkin pie became a common part of Thanksgiving dinner in the early nineteenth century. After the Civil War it was resisted in Southern states as a Yankee dish, and many Southern cooks made sweet potato pie instead.

The Food Historian calls Libby’s the iconic pumpkin pie recipe on many American tables, and traces it in stages. It found a 1912 Libby’s advertisement for evaporated milk with a pumpkin pie that thinned the milk with water. Libby’s bought the Dickinson canning company and its squash in 1929. Libby’s says its Famous Pumpkin Pie, made with evaporated milk, cinnamon, ginger and cloves, has appeared on its pumpkin labels since 1950. The Food Historian reports that Libby’s updated its recipe in 2019 to use sweetened condensed milk; Libby’s was still publishing the evaporated-milk Famous Pumpkin Pie in 2026.

The Dickinson business began in central Illinois. An Illinois State Historical Society marker unveiled in Morton in 2026 records that Elijah Dickinson came from Kentucky to Eureka in 1835 and planted pumpkins, that his sons opened a cannery there in 1898, and that plants followed in Washington in 1910 and Morton in 1925. Libby’s bought all three in 1929. The marker’s account, as reported by WMBD, has pumpkin canning consolidated at Morton in the 1960s; the Morton Public Library dates the move to 1970. Figures for Morton’s share differ. The library gives 90 percent of the world’s canned pumpkin. Morton’s mayor gave 95 percent of the pumpkins canned in the country, and Illinois Public Media reported that Illinois grows 95 percent of the pumpkins processed in the United States. Governor James Thompson declared Morton the Pumpkin Capital of the World in 1978.

Public Act 99-0364, from House Bill 208 sponsored by Rep. Keith Sommer, added Section 100 to the State Designations Act: “Pumpkin pie is designated the official State pie of the State of Illinois.” It took effect in January 2016. University of Illinois Extension reports that Illinois harvests more than twice as many pumpkin acres as the next five states combined, with more than 634 million pounds in 2022. Illinois is the only state assigned to this style.