Enough with spice season
By now, we’ve come to know October as the Pumpkin Spice month. Where once we thought of this month as the time of colorful hillsides of trees, we now mainly associate October with the flavors of ginger, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon.
I like ginger, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon – in a pumpkin pie – but I can’t think of a time I’ve ever used all four of them in a recipe. My family still remembers the Thanksgiving 2013 misstep when the farmer decided to impart juiciness to the turkey by adding cinnamon and cloves to the mix, and let’s just say we’ll not be doing that again.
No: cloves and their spice rack buddies belong in one thing and one thing only, and that’s pumpkin pie. The spices make a cloying, herby quadrangle of sweetness that is just overpowering. Except, that is, in pumpkin pie, and then only with a ton of whipped cream on top.
Anyway, the world is littered with pumpkin spice this week.
I think this all started with the Starbucks coffee concoction. Countdowns for it begin in July and August, with signs heralding its arrival. Soon, the pumpkin spice season will follow the absurdly anticipated timeline of the retail Christmas season, and just as the Santa displays start showing up in stores in early October, the pumpkin spice frenzy will show up in May – maybe even in April. Pumpkin spice Easter Peeps, anyone? In March, we can switch the leprechaun’s top hat from green to a nice rusty orange.
Walk into a grocery store, and see it everywhere. Your first warning will be the display in the produce section – small pumpkins and gourds with happy faces painted on them. This is fair warning that you are about to enter a haunted house where almost no aisle is safe: pumpkin spice has been cast upon cookies, tea, chips, donuts, cakes, frosting, pudding, bread, yogurt, coffee creamer and crackers. Last week, I was buying chocolate chips and, yes, there were bags of pumpkin spice baking chips on the rack.
The spice has crept into the nonfood aisles, too: there’s pumpkin spice soap, air freshener, hand cream and candles. Do not get me started on the candles. Yankee Candles has a whole wing devoted to pumpkin and the four spices.
Lots of stores smell like pumpkin spice, a calculated ploy to make you hungry for it. If there were music that captured the essence, they would bombard us with that, too. (Actually, Celine Dion music sounds a bit like how pumpkin spice smells.)
You would think we’d all be sick of this by now. With so much of the world smelling and tasting like pumpkin pie, will anybody really even want the pie come Thanksgiving Day?
This trend has bothered me for a while now, but who am I to judge the tastes of the masses. I’ve kept out of it until now. I decided to finally write about it earlier this week. Driving with my daughter, I passed a day spa. The sign out front read: Pumpkin Spice Facials.
We have gone a spice too far, people. We’ve lost our gourds.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.