59 Fun Facts About Fall Food

Which 2003 Starbucks flavour became its top seasonal seller?

Pumpkin spice: for its first twelve years the latte contained no pumpkin at all, and Starbucks added real pumpkin and dropped the caramel colouring only in 2015.

Which American spice company launched a ready-mixed 'pumpkin pie spice' in 1934?

McCormick: its blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice contains no pumpkin at all; it is named for the pie it was mixed to season.

Which 1796 cookbook, the first by an author from the new United States, printed early pumpkin pie recipes?

American Cookery: until Amelia Simmons, the cookbooks used in America were British; hers cooked with native corn, squash and pumpkin, including a 'pompkin' pudding baked in a crust.

Which brand cans America's best-selling pumpkin, all of it pale Dickinson squash?

Libby's: it cans so much of the country's pumpkin that when heavy rain swamped its 2009 harvest, it warned bakers of a shortage before Thanksgiving.

The record-setting pumpkin pie baked in New Bremen, Ohio, in 2010 was 20 feet across and weighed about how much?

3,700 lb, or 3,699 to be exact: the New Bremen growers smashed their own earlier record of 2,020 lb with a filling of 1,212 pounds of canned pumpkin and 2,796 eggs.

Which Halloween staple, a roll of pastel tablets, is sold as 'Rockets' north of the US border?

Smarties: founder Edward Dee moved his family from England to New Jersey in 1949 and began making them with just two machines in a rented factory.

Which Halloween sweet was once sold as 'Chicken Feed'?

Candy corn: it appeared when about half of Americans still worked on farms, so Goelitz pitched its kernels to them as feed fit for a rooster.

Which turkey brand runs the Turkey Talk-Line, a holiday hotline for flustered Thanksgiving cooks?

Butterball: since 1981 its experts have spent every November and December talking callers, and now texters, through thawing and roasting the bird.

Dan Walker, credited with creating the caramel apple in the 1950s, sold for which company?

Kraft: salesman Dan Walker is often credited with the caramel apple, yet Chicago's Affy Tapple had been selling them since 1948, before his 1950s experiment with surplus caramels.

Newark's William Kolb is said to have made the first red candy apple in 1908 while testing cinnamon candy for which holiday?

Christmas: the story goes that Kolb dipped a few apples in the red candy, set them in his shop window and sold the whole first batch at five cents each.

In Britain, toffee apples are eaten at Halloween and at which other autumn celebration?

Bonfire Night, 5 November: like Halloween, it falls just after the apple harvest, which is why apples dipped in hard toffee became the treat of both nights.

Which ingredient gives the British sweet known as plot toffee its slightly bitter flavour?

Black treacle is less sweet than sugar, hence the bitter edge; the brittle toffee was long made at home in big sheets and smashed into pieces with a small toffee hammer.

Why does flooding cranberry beds with six to eight inches of water work as a 'wet harvest'?

The ripe berries float: a machine churns through the flooded bed to beat them off the vines, and the bobbing fruit is corralled into a corner and pumped out.

Which Midwestern state grows about 60% of America's cranberries?

Wisconsin: the vines thrive in its sandy bogs, and about 250 growers there now out-harvest every other state combined; the cranberry is the official state fruit.

Which grower-owned cooperative, founded in 1930, markets most of North America's cranberries?

Ocean Spray: its three founding growers chose a cooperative partly because the form shielded them from antitrust law, and it grew to handle about two-thirds of the crop.

Only about 5% of the US cranberry crop reaches shoppers in which form?

Fresh: raw cranberries are hard, sour and bitter, so about 95% of the crop is processed, and fruit for the fresh market has to be picked dry to avoid bruising.

Which syrup brand helped popularise pecan pie with a 1930s recipe?

Karo: its makers pushed the recipe to sell more corn syrup, and the brand says the recipe is still called Karo pie; Texas named pecan pie its official state pie in 2013.

Mooncakes are traditionally eaten during which Chinese celebration?

Mid-Autumn Festival: the dense cakes are cut into small wedges and shared with tea, and businesses give boxes of them to clients as presents.

In a traditional lotus-seed mooncake, which ingredient at the centre stands for the full moon?

Salted egg yolk: a whole duck-egg yolk is baked into the sweet lotus paste, so that every wedge cut from the cake shows a slice of golden moon.

In legend, notes hidden in mooncakes helped rebels topple which dynasty, clearing the way for the Ming?

Yuan: in the folk tale, rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang and his adviser hid the date of their rising inside the cakes to slip it past China's Mongol rulers.

Which Canadian province produces roughly 70% of the world's maple syrup?

Quebec: its producers keep a strategic reserve of syrup to steady prices, and in 2011 and 2012 thieves drained about C$18 million worth from one of its warehouses.

Which state has long been the largest maple syrup producer in the United States?

Vermont makes about half of America's syrup; at its sugar-on-snow parties the hot syrup is poured over snow and eaten with sour dill pickles to cut the sweetness.

Roughly how many gallons of maple sap must be boiled down to make one gallon of syrup?

About 40, or anywhere from 20 to 50 depending on the tree: sap is only two to five per cent sugar, so nearly all of it has to be boiled away.

A 1925 Connecticut newspaper described members of which organisation eating 'Some-mores'?

The Girl Scouts: their 1927 handbook printed the recipe as 'Some More', and within a decade or so campers had slurred the name into s'more.

Which country holds its Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October?

Canada fixed the date only in 1957; in the 1920s its Thanksgiving shared a November Monday with Armistice Day, until the two were split in 1931.

Which vegetable was traditionally carved into Halloween lanterns in Ireland and Scotland before pumpkins?

Turnips were hollowed out and carved with faces in Ireland and Scotland; emigrants to America switched to the native pumpkin, which is softer, far larger and easier to carve.

Sharing medieval 'soul cakes' at Allhallowtide is a suggested origin of which Halloween practice?

Souling, in which children and the poor went door to door for small spiced soul cakes in return for prayers for the dead, is a suggested ancestor of trick-or-treating.

In Portugal, chestnuts are roasted over bonfires on 11 November, which saint's day, honouring a soldier who shared his cloak?

St Martin's Day is the best-known date for Portugal's magusto: families roast chestnuts in the embers and taste the year's new wine or the sweet, fortified jeropiga.

Chestnut blight, first noticed in New York in 1904, went on to kill roughly how many American chestnut trees?

About 4 billion American chestnuts died within a few decades, wiping out what had been one of the dominant hardwoods of the eastern forests.

Unlike the sweet chestnuts you roast, the 'conkers' of the horse chestnut tree are what?

Mildly poisonous: the horse chestnut is no relation of the sweet chestnut, and its bitter seeds are prized in Britain only for the playground game of conkers.

The very first Oktoberfest, held in 1810, was staged to celebrate what?

A royal wedding: Crown Prince Ludwig married Princess Therese, the party ended with a horse race on a meadow outside the city, and the grounds are still called Theresienwiese after her.

Only beer brewed within which city's limits may be sold at Oktoberfest?

Only beer from Munich's six big breweries, brewed inside the city limits to the Reinheitsgebot, may be served; Munich's mayor opens the festival by tapping the first keg with 'O'zapft is!'.

Which orange autumn fruit is sold as the astringent Hachiya and the squat, firm Fuyu?

Persimmon: tannins make an unripe Hachiya mouth-puckeringly bitter until it turns completely soft, while the tomato-shaped Fuyu has too little to matter and can be eaten firm.

Which pumpkin variety, bred by Nova Scotia's Howard Dill, lies behind many record-breakers weighing over 2,000 pounds?

Atlantic Giant: Dill, a farmer who left school young, taught himself plant genetics, spent years perfecting his heavyweights and set two world records with them.

The green bean casserole, now a Thanksgiving staple, was devised by Dorcas Reilly in 1955 in which company's test kitchen?

Campbell's: Reilly's team built the dish around two things most 1950s kitchens already held, green beans and cream of mushroom soup, and it took off once the recipe went on the can.

The Honeycrisp apple, a star of the fall orchard, was developed at which university?

The University of Minnesota bred Honeycrisp and released it in 1991; its explosive bite comes from unusually large cells that rupture rather than cleave, and it became Minnesota's state fruit in 2006.

Songpyeon, the rice cakes made for Chuseok, are steamed over a layer of what?

Pine needles lend the cakes a clean, resinous scent and also their name, since the 'song' in songpyeon means pine.

Songpyeon rice cakes are traditionally shaped like what?

Korean tradition holds that a half-moon can only grow fuller, while a moon already at its fullest can only wane, so the half-moon shape stands for prosperity to come.

Unlike the potato, which is a nightshade, the sweet potato belongs to which family of flowering vines?

Morning glory: the sweet potato is only a distant relative of the potato, and some varieties are bred purely as ornamental vines, grown for their showy foliage.

In North America, orange sweet potatoes are often sold under which unrelated tuber's name?

The naming habit is traced to enslaved Africans, who saw a resemblance to the yams of home. Botanical yams belong to the genus Dioscorea.

In the United States, what is the main thing that distinguishes fresh apple cider from apple juice?

American fresh cider is unfiltered, cloudy pressed juice, while apple juice is filtered and usually pasteurised; outside North America 'cider' means the alcoholic drink Americans call hard cider.

Which French red wine goes on sale on the third Thursday of each November, only weeks after the harvest?

Beaujolais: its nouveau is only weeks old when sales open at one minute past midnight, a ritual that grew out of races to get the first bottles to Paris.

Cider doughnuts, sold warm at cider mills every fall, are an autumn harvest tradition of which US region?

The Northeast: the pairing took off when early motorists began stopping at farm stands, which fried doughnuts in newly invented automatic machines beside the cider press.

Pan de muerto, the sweet bread for Dia de Muertos, is decorated on top with dough shaped like what?

Bones: the strips of dough stand for the bones of the dead; in one common reading the knob in the centre is the skull and the round loaf a little grave.

Grenadine syrup originally consisted of the thickened, sweetened juice of which autumn fruit?

Grenadine takes its name from grenade, French for pomegranate, whose thickened juice it originally was; in Greek myth eating pomegranate seeds bound Persephone to the underworld for part of each year.

Brussels sprouts are said to taste sweetest after which weather event?

A frost sweetens the buds, so gardeners leave them on the stalk late into the year; in the coldest northern states they are often picked after the first snow has fallen.

Brussels sprouts are a cultivar of the very same species, Brassica oleracea, as which other vegetable?

Kale and sprouts are one species, the wild cabbage, bred in different directions: kale for its loose leaves, sprouts for the tight buds that line the stalk.

An English apple pie recipe written down in 1381 coloured its filling with which spice?

Saffron: the recipe, 'For to Make Tartys in Applis', also mixed in figs, raisins and pears, and baked the lot in a pastry case it called a 'cofyn'.

H. B. Reese created his peanut butter cups after working as a shipping foreman for which chocolate maker?

Hershey: Reese ran one of Milton Hershey's dairy farms and later worked in the factory's shipping room before launching his cups in 1928; his sons merged the firm into Hershey in 1963.

The English word 'turkey' originally referred to which African bird traders brought via Turkey?

The guineafowl, imported into Europe through Ottoman Turkey, was the original 'turkey-cock'; when the similar American bird arrived in the 16th century, the name transferred to it.

What is the fleshy growth on a turkey's forehead that lengthens and reddens in courtship?

Snood: hens favour toms with longer snoods and rival males back down from them, while the wattle is the separate flap that hangs under the throat.

During the autumn harvest festival of Sukkot, observant Jews eat their festive meals in what?

A temporary hut: the branch-roofed sukkah is tied by tradition to the shelters of the Israelites in the wilderness, and may also echo the huts farmers slept in at harvest time.

In the 1940s Charles Leggett crossed a long-necked gooseneck squash with other varieties to breed which now-popular winter squash?

Butternut: Leggett, no trained plant breeder, wanted a tasty squash small enough for one family's dinner, found the Hubbard far too big, and showed his result at a state field station.

Which state harvests far more pumpkins than any other, most of them grown for canning?

Illinois: unlike other states it grows most of its pumpkins for the cannery, on about 70% of its pumpkin acreage, and out-harvests the next four states combined.

What is the botanical term for a berry with a hard rind, such as a pumpkin?

Pepo is the botanists' name for the tough-rinded berries of the gourd family, so pumpkins, cucumbers and watermelons all count as berries, while strawberries and raspberries do not.

Roasted, salted pumpkin seeds are sold under which Spanish-derived name?

Pepitas means 'little seeds' in Spanish; Austria's Styrian oil pumpkin carries a 19th-century mutation that stunts the seed's hull, so its dark green seeds grow without a hard shell.

Dr Thomas Welch first made unfermented grape juice in 1869 for use in what?

Church communion was the purpose: Thomas Welch, a Methodist dentist in Vineland, New Jersey, pasteurised grape juice as 'Dr. Welch's Unfermented Wine' so that congregations opposed to alcohol could take the sacrament.

Apple butter, the dark autumn spread, is essentially which apple dish cooked down for hours until thick?

Apple sauce simmered for hours with spices thickens and darkens into apple butter; the name describes only its spreadable texture, because it contains no dairy at all.

Acorn squash, though cooked as a winter squash, shares its species with which of these?

Zucchini and acorn squash are one species; acorn counts as a winter squash only because it is picked mature, once its rind has hardened enough for the fruit to be stored through the winter.