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.

Pumpkin pie was once cooked inside a pumpkin.

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The custardy pumpkin pies we eat today are far different from the earliest versions in colonial America. Some of the first pumpkin pies were crustless and baked inside a hollowed-out pumpkin, while other recipes layered slices of fried pumpkin and apples inside a simple pastry shell.

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.

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You may wonder how a long, purple fruit came to be called an “eggplant.” It all has to do with a specific popular variety from the 18th century known for its egglike color and circular shape. Eggplants were domesticated in the Indo-Burma region as early as 300 BCE and were called vatingana — a Sanskrit word derived from vani, meaning “wind.” During the British occupation of India, English horticulturist John Abercrombie took note of a particularly common local cultivar that looked white and spherical, much like a typical bird’s egg. In 1767, he wrote about this “egg-plant” in the book Every Man His Own Gardener, denoting the first use of the term in English literature.

New Jersey harvests more eggplants than any other U.S. state.

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While China is the biggest global exporter of eggplants, New Jersey harvests the most of any U.S. state. According to a 2019 report by New Jersey’s Department of Agriculture, the state harvests an annual average of 849 acres of eggplant, ahead of California’s average of 705 acres each year.

While these white, circular eggplants have since fallen out of fashion, similar varieties including the Easter eggplant are still grown. But in general, the most widely grown type of eggplant is known for its dark purple color and elongated shape. It wasn’t until the early 19th century that a shift to this variety took place in the United States, when new eggplant seeds were brought over by immigrants from various parts of Asia. In time, those colorful eggplant varieties came to displace the once-standard pale, ovate type.

Despite the fruit’s change in appearance, the original nomenclature stuck in the United States and Canada. However, other areas have coined names of their own. In the United Kingdom, the fruit is known as an “aubergine” (a French loanword). A brightly colored variant is referred to as a “garden egg” throughout parts of Africa and the Caribbean. And around the 16th century, eggplants were also briefly called “mad apples” in Europe, a name inspired by the fact that they’re members of the nightshade family and thus were once believed to be poisonous if eaten.

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Sweet potatoes and common potatoes share part of a name and the spotlight at Thanksgiving meals, but the two are entirely different plants — and sweet potatoes aren’t even potatoes. While both root vegetable species are native to Central and South America, they’re classified as unrelated. Sweet potatoes belong to the Convolvulaceae family, a group of flowering plants that’s also called the morning glory family. Potatoes belong to the nightshade (Solanaceae) family, and are cousins to peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants. 

Sweet potatoes were served at the first Thanksgiving.

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The orange-fleshed tubers are typical feasting fare, but they didn’t grace the holiday spread at the first Thanksgiving in 1621. That’s because sweet potatoes weren’t yet grown in North America; the first known crops were planted in Virginia nearly three decades later in 1648.

Both species get their name from an Indigenous Caribbean term, batata, which eventually morphed into the English “potato.” By the 1740s, “sweet” was added to the orange-fleshed tuber’s name to differentiate the two root crops.

Then there are yams. Although they’re often served interchangeably with sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving dinners, this third root crop is biologically unrelated to either sweet potatoes or common potatoes. These tubers belong to the Dioscoreacea family, a group of flowering plants usually cultivated in tropical areas. Luckily, you don’t have to know their scientific classification to distinguish between the two nonspuds at the grocery store: Sweet potatoes have tapered ends and relatively smooth skin, while true yams are generally larger with rough bark and a more cylindrical shape. At most U.S. grocery stores, what you’re seeing labeled as a yam is probably actually a sweet potato.

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