Pumpkin Pie Spice

Day 2 of Spicemas

My husband, clutching his first cup of coffee and watching me open the advent calendar window, “is this going to change dinner plans? Will we still have spaghetti?”

No, I assured him, taking hold of the little packet and pulling it out so we could see today’s spice, we’d still have spaghetti.

Which we will.

Pumpkin pie spice, a blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, and mace, has gotten a bad rap in the last couple of decades. Pumpkin pie spice doesn’t have any pumpkin in it, but yet you see any number of dubiously orange products proclaiming they contain this luxurious blend of baking spices. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and that is certainly the reaction of the internet to having their noses rubbed in the absurd marketing. I’m willing to bet most of them would not react the same way to walking into a kitchen perfumed with the spice while a pie, or cake, or cookies infused with it was baking.

I’ve often said that pumpkin pie spice is the same thing as apple pie spice, and although this may be true of how I spice my pies, a quick survey of some of my cookbooks reveals that apple pies tend to have only cinnamon in them. Which really is a shame, as the apples and the complex spice blend - especially the ginger - play so well together. That aside, this blend is often more than would be included in a classic pumpkin pie recipe, as spices were expensive. Which is, of course, why the blend came into existence. Keeping separate bottles of all six spices, when you might use a half a teaspoonful a year of these highly volatile and perishable flavors, made little sense to a frugal housewife. Personally, I tend to buy whole spices where I can, and grind them on demand as they last longer in their whole forms. And I look for ways and places to add spices, so I am using them before they fade to mere dust in a jar, their wonderful chemical compounds having dissipated into the air of my kitchen.

A quick look at Apple Pie recipes

Still, though, there is a reason Mace fell from favor, I’ve written about that in the past. Cloves, as well, are now considered old fashioned and you don’t see them as often in recipes. Even allspice, which was the first day of Spicemas, is less common in the spice cabinets of the cook than it was. Which leaves you with cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, wonderful all… and yet, there is something about the totality of the six spices that is lacking if you take away half of them.

From my Mother-in-Law’s 1963 McCalls cookbook, which she gifted to my husband and I shortly after our marriage. It is a wonderful treasure trove of a book, filled with her own notes and recipes, clippings, and held together by duct tape.

I grew up learning to bake from this 1957 edition of Meta Given’s Encyclopedia of Cooking, which has more than one variant on pumpkin pie!

And the modern edition of Joy of Cooking doesn’t even have all the blend in it.

If you look closely at that 1963 McCall’s recipe, you’ll note it calls for pumpkin pie spice, and that the blend only contains cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and mace, leaving out the cloves and allspice entirely. Spice blends tend to vary, and a cook’s taste will leave out - or include! - whatever she likes. The pumpkin pie spice I had in my baking cupboard is even more complex than the packet from the calendar, for that matter, as it also includes caraway and coriander (while leaving out the mace, boo!).

While talking to my husband about an apple tart (and promising there would be no pumpkin pie spice anywhere near tonight’s spaghetti sauce!) I realized that the pumpkin pie latte is very popular, the spice blend is very close to the kafe hawaij I use almost daily in my coffee (cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves), so the obvious thing to do was to make myself a spiced coffee.

Just a smidgen of the spice blend is all you want in there. I use cream in my coffee, but you could do whatever you like with it. Stir, sip, and enjoy waking up with the luxury of spices tickling your nose as they rise up from your warm cup.

I’d say a smidgen is between 1/8 and 1/4 of a teaspoonful.

I enjoy adding spice to my coffee as I’m trying to avoid sugar or sweeteners in it, as I cut those back slowly from my life. With a little cream, and some added spice or Dutch-processed cocoa powder (and on a wild day, both spice and chocolate!) my coffee is transformed and elevated to a new level. I do sometimes drink my coffee black - if I have a very nice coffee, like King Harv’s, especially - but find I need the cream if I am drinking much of it on a day.

Try it, you might like it! Pumpkin Pie Spice might be ubiquitous for a reason!