Libby’s created its own variety of pumpkin.
Baking a no-frills pumpkin pie with canned pumpkin and a premade crust takes about an hour today, though pie-making wasn’t always so simple. Before the ease of cracking open a can of pumpkin, cooks had to stew their own mixture, cooking pumpkins for hours just to create a custardy pie filling. Selecting the right pumpkin was paramount to a proper pie — not every pumpkin was a prize pick for the pastry. “Field pumpkins,” aka the ones often bought today for decoration and carving, are particularly poor foodstuffs. Their stringy, watery flesh has little flavor, and for centuries they were considered fare for livestock, not people. But by the 1930s, the canned-food company Libby’s had changed the pumpkin perspective, helping to popularize the once time-intensive holiday dish — all by creating its own strain of pumpkins that are full of flavor.
Contrary to much skepticism, canned pumpkin produced by Libby’s is real pumpkin, just not the kind you typically see at a pumpkin patch. Dickinson pumpkins, the seeds of which were first acquired by Libby’s in 1929 and are still used today, are more closely related to butternut squash than most species of field pumpkins, though classifying what counts as a squash or pumpkin is a botanical gray area. Both pumpkins and squash are considered cucurbits — a category of nearly 1,000 plant species, including cucumbers, melons, and gourds — though the larger confusion comes in part from language. Until the 19th century, “pumpkin” and “squash” were interchangeable terms. (Today, all pumpkins are considered a type of squash, and the term “pumpkin” itself doesn’t have a precise botanical meaning.) In 1957, the USDA vaguely declared that any “golden-fleshed, firm-shelled, sweet varieties of either pumpkins or squashes” could be used as canned pumpkin. Dickinson pumpkins grown from Libby’s Select Seed, the company’s proprietary variety, meet that requirement. That said, the semantics may not really matter that much after all — the specially grown gourds have become synonymous with pumpkin pie, so popular that Libby’s claims to sell enough of its canned product to produce 90 million pumpkin pies each holiday season.
Libby’s isn’t the original creator of its famed pumpkins; American farmer Elijah Dickinson produced his eponymous strain of pumpkins in the early 1800s, first cultivating them in Kentucky before relocating to central Illinois. There, Dickinson and his brothers invested in a cannery, and by 1920, Dickinson & Co. owned three such facilities, including one in Morton, Illinois — a spot that’s today known as the “pumpkin capital of the world.” Libby’s purchased the Dickinson operation in 1929, and in the decades since has grown the region into the globe’s leading producer of canned pumpkin. Morton farms — and those in the surrounding area — primarily grow Dickinson pumpkins from Libby’s Select Seed each year, and the agricultural output adds up. All in all, they produce 85% of the world’s canned pumpkin.
