Tea breads are a fancier name for quick breads. Banana bread, lemon bread, zucchini bread and pumpkin bread are the most common tea breads in the States, but there are countless others, from apple to chocolate to pineapple to strawberry. Tea breads are often confused with pound cakes, but in fact they’re quite a bit leaner (usually), having both less fat and fewer eggs in the mix.

How long have tea breads been around? Oh about a hundred years, roughly. Several of the classics date to the home baking explosion which occurred in the 1880’s as post-Civil War industry got on to the more important business of mass-producing baking pans and implements for American consumers.

Excellent, reader Mark! Thank you. We’ve been talking a lot about gluten lately, your question is a continuation of that important topic. As we know, moisture and agitation causes gluten to develop. Developed gluten in a cake-like device is a problem because it toughens the finished product. Most of us have probably tasted over-beaten tea breads, those sweet but rubbery slices that sometimes appear on holiday buffet tables.

You can judge an over-beaten tea cake (or cake, or muffin) by sight: that very tall crown — a muffin with a conical top, a cake layer that’s humped up in the middle, a tea bread loaf that looks like a treasure chest. All evidence that the crumb is holding too much gas and steam. Believe it or not, while we bakers rely on chemical leaveners to create gas pockets that will fill up with steam in the oven, we ultimately want most of that gas and steam to escape.

Every year I get questions from readers asking whether they should consider using fresh pumpkin in their seasonal baking. That’s understandable. It’s the gourmand’s reflex to want to prepare everything fresh and from scratch. However I have yet to meet a professional baker or pastry chef who’s ever recommended getting their pumpkin fresh out of the squash versus simply opening up a tin.

I know how that sounds…but having roasted and scooped my share of fresh pumpkin flesh over the years, I can honestly say that I can’t tell the difference in taste — and I vastly prefer the texture of canned pumpkin. More than that, canned is extremely consistent in terms of moisture content, which eliminates the risk of a watery custard or soggy bread.

Something else that’s notable about Simmons’ book, at least for those of us who bake, is that it is the first to document the use of chemical leavening…a very American technique that was originally pioneered by native peoples.

When did the first “real” pumpkin pie arrive on the culinary scene? Unknown. Pumpkin pies, which were more like squash tarts, started to appear in Europe not long after the first pumpkin “pie” was served at the second American Thanksgiving in 1621. Precisely 30 years later, in 1651, the legendary French chef and cookbook author Pierre la Varenne published a recipe for pumpkin tart: basically sweetened pumpkin mixed with milk and butter. Similar recipes started appearing in English cookbooks within a couple of decades.

It wasn’t until about a hundred years later that the first known custard-based pumpkin preparation appeared in print. It was in America and, appropriately enough, in the first American cookbook ever published: American Cookery, by “Amelia Simmons, an American Orphan.” Simmons’ recipes for “pompkin pudding” are identical to our modern pumpkin pie fillings.