In 1934 Baltimore-based McCormick & Company, founded by Willoughby M. McCormick in 1889, formulated a mix of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and allspice to create the first commercial blend of the now iconic fall flavor Pumpkin Pie Spice.
Nutmeg, one of the four spices in Pumpkin Pie Spice, can be traced back thousands of years to Indonesia when archaeologists discovered its residue on 3,000 year-old pottery shards. Notably, nutmeg grew nowhere else in the world during the 17th century, and the story of how this and other spices became widespread in the Western world is a story of colonialism and imperialism.
In 1796 the first official Pumpkin Pie Spice recipe was recorded when a woman named Amelia Simmons’ cookbook American Cookery, the first cookbook written by an American to be published in the United States, included a custard-style “pompkin” pie. The flavorings in Simmons’ pie recipe were molasses, allspice and ginger, a very similar blend to what we know today as Pumpkin Pie Spice.
More About Maryland’s McCormick & Company
Started in a cellar before moving downtown, most of the company’s assets and records were destroyed in the Great Baltimore Fire of February 1904, when 80 blocks and 1,500 buildings were decimated. “We lost everything but our books, which we got out at about 3 o’clock this morning,” Willoughby wrote in a letter home to his mother, according to a 2014 Baltimore magazine article profiling the company’s 125th anniversary. “We had to run for our lives.”
Today McCormick can be found in more than 125 countries and produces one of the most-well know spices to Marylanders. Old Bay is part of the company’s product line, but McCormick didn’t invent the summertime spice; that credit goes to Gustav Brunn, a German Jew who escaped the Nazis and set up the Baltimore Spice Company in 1939.