A Defence of Pumpkin Spice

As the warm days of summer turn into autumn nights, a familiar product returns to coffee shops all over the world: the Pumpkin Spice Latte.

When this happens, one can almost hear the collective groan of coffee people everywhere. The Pumpkin Spice Latte (now also known as ‘the PSL’) has taken on a reputation among coffee aficionados as the most tiresome drink on Earth. And, like some kind of epidemic, Pumpkin Spice as a flavour has taken over everything else—we now have Pumpkin Spice candles, Pumpkin Spice potato chips, Pumpkin Spice cereal, Pumpkin Spice lotion, and more. A friend of mine jokes every year that when he gets his annual flu shot, they offer him a Pumpkin Spice option. As I say, tiresome.

Of course, actual people love pumpkin spice. And it’s not the pumpkin they love so much, it’s the spice. Few Pumpkin Spice products contain pumpkin, but they all definitely contain spices. The spices are specific and they are five in number: ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice. And these five spices all have a long-standing relationship with coffee, one that long predates the PSL. In fact, I’m of the opinion that these spices are why we have coffee in the first place. Let me explain.

Unlike animals, plants are rooted, stuck. Bound to the soil, they cannot flee a predator or an infestation, so they must stand and fight. To achieve this, plants muster a vast array of defences, from tough bark to spiky thorns to complex protective chemicals. Some plants—particularly in the tropics—produce unique compounds in their tissues that repel pests and infections. These aromatic compounds are called phenols, and they are a little bit magical—some deter insects, some kill bacteria, and some interfere with an animal’s internal systems. Ancient peoples discovered that phenol-rich plants could be harvested for their unique properties—burning phenol-rich resins would repel insects, coating meat with phenol-rich plants would preserve it, and certain plants could affect digestion or even numb pain. Many of these magical plants came from Southeast Asia, and were treasured for their aromatic, medicinal, and magical properties. These plants came to be known as species in Latin (‘spices’ in English) and the Indonesian archipelago became known as the Spice Islands.

Spices from Southeast Asia transformed the ancient world. The bark of cinnamon, a tree from Sri Lanka, was used to preserve meat (the ancient Egyptians even used it for mummification). Oil of cinnamon was considered so powerful that it was mentioned in the Bible as one of Moses’s holy anointing oils. Dried flower buds of the clove tree, native to the tiny volcanic islands called the Malukus, would numb the mouth when chewed and, when poked into fruit, would magically preserve it indefinitely. Ginger, a root common to Southeast Asian islands, was effective at curing stomach ailments and sweetening food. And nutmeg, also from the Maluku Islands, was potently aromatic and thought to be an aphrodisiac (not to mention a protection against disease).

It wasn’t long before the magical reputation of these phenol-rich Asian spices reached the Mediterranean. Demand for spices soared (alongside other phenolic plant resins like incense), and some of the oldest global trade routes were established to carry them over land and sea to ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Levant. This trade became known as the ‘spice trade’, and it was incredibly important: spices were critical for use as medicine, in religious ceremonies, and, increasingly, in food. The most important spice route originated in the Indonesian spice islands, crossed the Indian Ocean, and entered the Bab al-Mandab Strait to the Red Sea. This strait—and the ports beyond it—were controlled by the inhabitants of the land we now call Yemen. This made Yemen ground zero for the lucrative, world-changing spice trade.

By the Middle Ages, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg were the spice trade. If you had even a little extra money, you’d invest it in spices—they smelled good, yes, but they were also a medicine, a preservative, and a holy salve. The upper classes put these spices in everything, from powders to incense to aromatic oils, from meat dishes to desserts to spiced wines. During the Black Death, ‘plague doctors’ would stuff their masks with spices to ward off infection. In happier times, the elite would scent their entire lives with spices—burning spicy incense in church, using spices as pomanders to freshen living quarters, and grinding spices over everything edible. But it wasn’t just Europe—the Ottoman Empire was crazy for spices too, and spices were deeply integrated into Turkish and Arabic culture. Around 1500, Yemeni traders began integrating coffee—another miraculous product, this one from Ethiopia—into their spice shipments. Before long, the coffee trade had become closely intertwined with the spice trade; the very same ships and caravans that carried cloves and nutmeg transported the exciting new bean that made qahwa, that delicious, stimulating drink. Coffee was thought of as a kind of spice—and why not, after all, loaded as it is with aromatic phenols and possessing the almost magical power of wakefulness. In the souks of Arabia, coffee was sold and consumed right alongside the other spices, and indeed often in combination: a bit of dried ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, and/or clove in a dallah of coffee was a delicious addition.

Anything this valuable was worth fighting over, and soon European maritime powers sought to take over the spice trade from the Asian and Muslim kingdoms that controlled it. Soon enough, the Portuguese and Spanish established a new spice route around the Horn of Africa rather than through Yemen. This enabled European powers to disrupt Yemeni control of the spice trade, but they didn’t have coffee, at least not yet. Yemen continued to be the sole source of coffee for the next 200 years.

Meanwhile, Europeans headed to the New World, where they discovered new spices. Among them was the Jamaican tree the Spanish eagerly called pimenta (their word for pepper). It wasn’t really pepper, but it was a pretty cool spice nonetheless: pimenta trees bore a berry that, when dried, boasted a flavour similar to cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg combined. The British gave pimenta a new name—‘allspice’—and began shipping it back to Europe. The Portuguese, meanwhile, had seized control of the spice islands and Sri Lanka, aiming to dominate the spice trade. Then, everything changed.

First, Holland’s Dutch East Indies Company successfully wrested control of the spice islands away from the Portuguese. They went on to take over Sri Lanka and outposts all over Asia, controlling the trade in cinnamon, clove, ginger, and nutmeg. But times were changing; spices were being grown in more places, making them cheaper and more accessible. Europe was figuring out that eliminating vermin, providing clean water, and draining malaria-infested swamps were more effective at preventing sickness than merely smelling spices. This was the dawn of the European period we call the Enlightenment, and the drink of the Enlightenment was coffee.

The Dutch East Indies Company got the memo and changed strategy: they sent spies to Yemen to steal cuttings of the precious Arabian coffee trees. They established coffee plantations on the island of Java, replacing their spice networks with the coffee trade. Following the Dutch example, the French and British planted coffee in the West Indies, abandoning their dreams of spice-producing colonies in the Caribbean and shifting their focus to coffee, sugarcane, and the brutal slave trade.

By the 18th century, a thriving global coffee trade had established itself exactly on the networks created by the pre-existing spice trade. Cloves, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice had all paved the way for coffee, a new, magical commodity that was made into a beautiful, fragrant beverage. Coffee was the new spice, joining the great spices of the past. The very same merchants traded them all.

It was in this moment that the British colonies of North America decided to revolt and establish a new American nation. They invented a new American holiday—Thanksgiving—and adopted as its symbolic dessert a pie made from a bland native American squash, the pumpkin. And, in an echo of the Medieval spice craze, the uninspiring filling was livened up with those spice-trade classics: clove, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice. Pumpkin pie—its flavour less about pumpkin and more about spices—became an annual tradition among Americans celebrating Thanksgiving.

In 1934, the McCormick Spice Company of Baltimore, Maryland introduced a time-saving product for pumpkin pie makers: they pre-mixed the five classic spice-trade spices in a convenient metal tin, calling the product ‘Pumpkin Pie Spice’. Since Americans had lost their knowledge and passion for spices by this time anyway, Pumpkin Spice became shorthand for the forgotten spices of the spice trade. The term became associated with autumn—Thanksgiving-time—rather than the exotic, magical spice islands of Asia. And, perhaps inevitably, somebody combined the five spice-trade spices with coffee, milk, and sugar (the same thing Arab coffee drinkers had done 500 years before) and called it a Pumpkin Spice Latte. This drink— ‘invented’ during the mid-’90s flavoured-latte craze—was really a manifestation of the history of the spice trade, with roots in the Indo-Pacific, and its explosion onto the ancient world. The backstory of the PSL includes the sheikhs and traders of Yemen, the rapacious European empires of the Age of Sail, the exalted tastes of European and Ottoman aristocracies, and the foundations of the coffee trade itself.

So, we should not scorn the Pumpkin Spice Latte, as tedious as it seems every year. Instead, we should view it as a miracle of culinary history, a link between our local coffee shop and the historic spice trade that brought us coffee in the first place.