This recipe comes from Vegetable Cookery, one of the earliest completely vegetarian cookbooks. It was first published in periodical form in 1812, then went on to be published as a book. This recipe comes from the fourth edition published in 1833. Since the word “vegetarian” wasn’t popularized until the 1850s, Vegetable Cookery doesn’t actually use that term and refers to a “vegetable diet” instead.
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One of my favorite things about fall is cooking with pumpkin – whether it’s pumpkin pies, pumpkin cakes, or pumpkin sauces, I will pretty much try anything with pumpkin in it. As a result, I almost always have small amounts of leftover pumpkin purée sitting around. This recipe for pumpkin cakes, from Lettice Bryan’s 1839 book The Kentucky Housewife, is just the ticket to use up any pumpkin remnants. Although they are baked in an oven instead of on a griddle, these are very similar to hoe-cakes or pancakes; Lettice Bryan includes them in the chapter “Warm Cakes &c. for Breakfast and Tea.”
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This variation on pumpkin pie comes from actress and writer Mae West. It appears in a 1933 community cookbook published by the Assistance League of Southern California, alongside contributions from several other Hollywood stars such as Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Constance Bennet, Marion Davies, and Cary Grant.
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This recipe, one of the first published recipes for pumpkin pie, comes from Amelia Simmons’ 1796 cookbook American Cookery, the first cookbook written by an American to be published in the United States.
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History in the Making 