BALI, INDONESIA – Pumpkin Spice is back at Starbucks. And a week or so earlier, Dunkin Donuts announced the return of their own pumpkin spice coffee drinks.
Honestly, I’ve never tried either one of their flavored drinks. I prefer my pumpkin spice in its original form – fresh-baked pumpkin pie! It’s been my favorite dessert since I was a kid growing up in Ohio.
Since moving to Indonesia, I’ve discovered a surprising link between Starbucks, my favorite Midwest childhood dessert and a group of tiny islands in eastern Indonesia. Curious?
A look back
As a kid growing up in rural Ohio, my favorite parts of the year were summer vacation and the whole Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s stretch of holidays.
Summer was an obvious favorite. What kid doesn’t look forward to the end of the school year, summer weather and no more homework.
As for the holidays, it wasn’t just the promise of soon receiving Christmas presents. Or the barrage of holiday cookies, fruitcakes and candy canes.
My favorite dessert
For me, the holiday season was really all about Pumpkin Pie! I could have always eaten an entire pie. I loved the stuff. Still do!
And if it was served with whipped cream topping (made with real whipping cream), I could imagine I’d died and gone to heaven.
Sometimes I helped my mom roll out the dough for the crust and carefully layered it into the pan while she prepared the filling.
She often used fresh pumpkin, straight from our garden. She’d boil big chunks of the bright orange squash until it was soft enough to blend into a smooth puree.
Then Mom added other ingredients to the mix: eggs, condensed milk, sugar and, of course, the spices.
Spices are the magic ingredient
The spices are where the magic of pumpkin pie really happens – cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg.
Growing up, I usually saw only ground-up versions of those spices, though sometimes we got whole cloves. We would poke them into a fresh orange like a pincushion to make a decorative holiday ball. Then we hung it up to release its spicy scent into the house as it slowly shriveled and dried.
But the other spices just looked like coarse powder in different shades of brown, packed into small square tins with holes in the top.
I had no idea what they looked like in their natural state or where they came from.
Fast forward about 60 years
Now, in our early 70s, my wife and I are living in Bali, Indonesia. We’ve traveled a bit around Southeast Asia – Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam – and are always interested in learning about the cultures and traditions wherever we go.
So when we learned about a 10-day sailing tour to Indonesia’s Spice Islands this past spring, we signed up right away.
In our pre-trip research about the islands, we learned just how important the spice trade – especially nutmeg – was to European traders in the 17th and 18th centuries. And how devastating their interaction was to the local population.
We visited some of those early battle grounds where European invaders fought each other, as well as the native residents, in their attempts to establish trading monopolies among the tiny islands. The sheer number of lives lost over something as seemingly mundane as a cooking spice boggles my mind.
Nutmeg: it grows on trees
Our tour showed us just where and how nutmeg grows here on a handful of tiny islands in the easternmost part of the Indonesian archipelago, originally its only source worldwide. We visited a working nutmeg plantation and spoke with its 13th generation owner.
Learning what happens at the source, I have a newfound admiration and respect for the powdered product inside those tiny square spice tins.
To this day, pumpkin pie (with its distinctive spice mix) remains my dessert of choice – when I can get it. Most people seem to think it’s just for Thanksgiving dinner, so restaurants rarely serve it the rest of the year.
Pumpkin Spice: The secret’s out
Over the last several years it seems more and more people have joined the pumpkin bandwagon, not so much for the pie as for the mix of spices.
Considering my lifelong love affair with pumpkin pie, I wasn’t surprised to see the introduction into the marketplace of other pumpkin spice concoctions.
Beginning about 20 years ago with flavored coffee drinks, the offerings have since expanded exponentially, and now include coffee creamers, tea, hot cocoa mix, bread and muffins, donuts, cakes and cookies, baking mixes, flavored syrup, protein powder, breakfast cereals, ice cream, butter, cheese, popcorn, marshmallows, candies, chewing gum, dog treats and more.
And, apparently, pumpkin spice isn’t just for food products. It can also be found in candles, air freshener sprays, incense, dish and hand soap, lip gloss, Chapstick and deodorant.
A search for ‘pumpkin spice’ on Amazon.com turned up seven pages of products!
Those early nutmeg traders had no idea what they were starting.
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