Early settlers loved the pumpkin. But it was Mexico’s favorite first.

It’s been 400 years since the recently arrived Pilgrims and resident Wampanoags held a three-day diplomatic feast that historians later described as the first Thanksgiving. And it’s been 200 years since Sarah Josepha Hale, an early arbiter of good American taste, suggested in a novel that a turkey should fill the meal’s centerpiece, with pumpkin pie occupying “the most distinguished niche.” 

But how exactly did the humble pumpkin – a stringy squash generally overshadowed by its regular companions of sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves – come to secure such a hallowed role in the most American of holidays? What does