Tuesday Blend: The Pie Before Cinnamon — Sweet Ginger, Sweet Orange & Black Pepper From a 1796 Recipe

This week’s pour: 5 drops sweet ginger, 5 drops sweet orange, 2 drops black pepper in your Nebulizing Diffuser®. That’s twelve drops in total. Ginger leads, orange rounds off the edges the way a spoon of sugar softens a filling, and black pepper sits underneath like the dark, nutty spice at the back of a slice.

Here’s the jewel. Cooked pumpkin smells mild, a little sweet and squash-like. Most of what memory files under “pumpkin pie” is the spice, and the spice has changed over time. The first pumpkin pies printed in an American cookbook, Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), were seasoned with mace, nutmeg and ginger in one recipe and allspice and ginger in the other. Neither one used cinnamon. The cinnamon-led tin came much later: in 1934 McCormick blended cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice into one jar, a few years after Libby’s canned pumpkin (1929) turned pie into a weeknight bake. Ginger is the only spice that appears in every version.

We don’t carry nutmeg or mace, which both come from the same fruit: nutmeg is the seed, and mace is the lacy red aril wrapped around it. Black pepper stands in for them here. It shares sabinene with nutmeg, a fresh, faintly woody note, and it adds a dry warmth that keeps the blend from tipping into candy. Keep it to two drops. Any more and the room reads as a savory kitchen rather than dessert. Diffuse for about 20 minutes while the oven warms, or whenever the afternoon turns gray. If you’d like the 1934 version, add one drop of cinnamon (ours is bark oil, so a single drop is plenty). For more cozy pours, our fall blends guide has seven more.