Everything You Need to Know About America's Favorite Canned Pumpkin
There's a reason everyone grabs Libby's for the holidays.
Sure, you could cut open a pumpkin, scrape out the seeds and pulp, bake the flesh and puree it yourself to make a pumpkin pie, but you could also do what almost every chef and home cook does instead — and open a can. When Libby’s canned pumpkin hit the market in the 1920s, pumpkin pie became a heck of a lot easier to make. And once the company started printing its now-famous pie recipe on the back of its cans in the 1950s, a bona fide Thanksgiving star was born.
Today, Libby’s (based in Morton, IL, since 1929) is still the biggest name in canned pumpkin: It produces 85% of the canned pumpkin in America, enough to make roughly 90 million pumpkin pies every year! Meanwhile, the Famous Pumpkin Pie recipe on the can has been many families’ go-to for generations. In 2019, the company daringly introduced a recipe for New Fashioned Pumpkin Pie made with sweetened condensed milk, claiming it results in a creamier pie. Loyal fans weren’t impressed, but they couldn’t complain: Libby’s kept the original recipe on every can, too (see photo above).
Credits:
All text written by Francesca Cocchi for Food Network Magazine.
Puppy photograph courtesy of Getty Images.
Dickinson Squash photograph courtesy of AP Images.
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