Editor’s note: OPB’s video series “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest. Now we’re taking the same guiding principles to a new platform: Email. We’ve brought on food writer Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian and botanist, to highlight different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem every week. This week she takes a look at sugar in the Northwest.

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As many of us wrung our hands over the past few months wondering whether the rains would ever come, the faithful among us knew that rain can always be counted on for one thing: ruining Halloween. Sorry, kids, it’s going to be another soggy slog this year, but don’t worry, there’s still always candy. From sea-salted caramels to strawberry ice cream, Oregonians love their sweets. But do you know which sweet Northwest crop helped secure our nation’s victory in World War II? Read on to find out!

Small bites: Chicory dicory dock, the turkey ran up the crock

Freshly picked morsels from the Pacific Northwest food universe:

Bitter is better and pink is the new green

In case you missed it, Thursday was the first-ever Radicchio Symposium, followed by the Sagra del Radicchio scheduled for Friday evening, brought to us by Chicory Week and the Culinary Breeding Network. Don’t feel bad if you couldn’t make it to the events — winter greens season is just getting started, and Northwest-grown varieties, both new and heirloom, are some of the most beautiful bitter greens you’ll ever eat. Look for them at farmers markets or better-stocked produce sections around the state.

Oregon turkeys had better duck

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has heard the cries of farmers around the state: Those darn turkeys are ruining everything. OPB’s Kristian Foden-Vencil reported in August that Oregon’s new “hunt by reservation” system could help desperate farmers rid themselves of the feathered pests — and those reservations are about to come up. Through the month of November, those whose permit applications were drawn will have their chance to bag a bird for the holidays. Bird hunters, there are still a couple dozen permits up for grabs.

When it comes to stashing food, Americans say “cheddar safe than sorry”

Omri Wallach at Visual Capitalist reported this week that the United States is hoarding a heckton of cheese — approximately 1.5 billion pounds of the stuff. The website’s handy infographic illustrates how big that hoard is in real terms (using anything but the metric system, naturally): It’s bigger than the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, Tower of Pisa, the Great Sphinx of Giza, and one heavy human combined. Sadly, the infographic fails to note how many grilled cheese sandwiches the stockpile would yield.

The amazing adventures of calavera and clay

This week is Halloween (also known as All Hallows’ Eve), and the days that follow, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, have been observed in Christian European cultures for centuries. Many of the traditions of these days, however, also appeared in pre-Christian societies, as seen in evil-banishing fires lit during the Gaelic harvest festival Samhain, and the Slavic folk practice of offering food in communion with the dead on the autumn dziady, or grandfather’s rituals. Bobbing for apples may not be a covid-friendly activity these days, but doing it on Oct. 31 dates back to the ancient Celts. The ancestors are nearest when the veil is thin.

In pre-Christian Mexico, Aztecs observed the ceremony known as Miccaihuitl. These rituals honored the dead, praised the harvest and acknowledged the transition to the dark season. The Spaniards glommed onto this when foisting Christianity on the Aztecs, and over the centuries the two holidays became inextricably, syncretically enmeshed, just as many other pagan and Christian holidays have (see Christmas trees festooned in lights and Easter bunnies with baskets of eggs). The calavera, or skulls made of compressed sugar paste (alfeñique) or clay, exemplify the blended traditions of pre-Columbian Indigenous Mexicans and European Christianity. Walk through any tienda in Gresham, Salem or Woodburn and you’ll see these woven traditions are still alive and well today.

Candy is dandy

Of course, some people would rather eat sugar on Halloween than use it to adorn altars to the dead. According to a national survey by Candystore.com, the most popular candy in Oregon is M&Ms, followed by peanut butter cups and candy corn. (Candy corn?? Quelle horreur!) The Northwest’s more nostalgic denizens might’ve suggested the Idaho Spud Bar, or perhaps the fudge and salt water taffy at the coast’s many candy stores. Honestly, these days it seems you can’t throw a rock in this state without hitting a fair-trade, single-origin chocolatier.

People in Oregon have loved sugar for as long as people have been here. In earth ovens, Indigenous Northwesterners roasted camas bulbs into sticky mash, slapped them into heavy cakes, and stockpiled them for nibbles of something sweet during the winter. (They may be nearly pure carbohydrate, but because camas bulbs are high in inulin, they are also low on the glycemic index, which studies have shown to have a lower impact on blood glucose; conversely, foods introduced to Native people by Europeans have been correlated to an increase in diabetes.)

Many of Oregon’s earliest restaurants started out as bonbon shops that happened to include an oyster parlor. Before Charles Alisky opened his well-regarded Portland restaurant in the 1880s, he and his partner Charles Hegele ran an ice cream saloon and candy shop on First and Alder specializing in “caramels and cream bonbons.” Swetland’s Sweet Shop and The Hazelwood opened around the same time, the former selling chicken pies in addition to its array of confectionery, and the latter offering a full-service restaurant to complement its ice cream. After another high-profile Portland restaurant, The Louvre, closed in 1913 amid the “Vice Clique Scandal” that outed and prosecuted 30 members of Portland’s social elite as gay, the eatery reopened as a candy shop and diner called The Rainbow Grill.

Just beet it

In the United States, white sugar was still a fairly new commodity in the 19th century, and was a luxury most ordinary households couldn’t afford. Sugar beet cultivation picked up in Europe and the United Kingdom in the early 1800s and the cold-hardy alternative to sugar cane made its way to the New World by the 1830s. Before the century was up, farmers across the West had taken up growing sugar beets, with Utah and Eastern Oregon becoming new epicenters of sugar production.

In 1898, Oregon Sugar Company opened the Northwest’s first beet sugar processing plant in La Grande. The Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station in Corvallis reported hopefully that “[t]he people of LaGrande, and indeed the entire state, have much to congratulate themselves for as the industry is one of the most important in the northwest and is bound to be successful.” Unfortunately, a lack of irrigation in Eastern Oregon, poor timing on seeding and tilling, and a heat wave that kept temperatures between 90 and 105 degrees for three weeks straight meant that those first yields were not great. The lessons were gleaned, however, not the least of which being that sugar beets are best grown by many farmers on a smaller scale rather than on a large scale by a few.

Around the same time, Ogden Sugar Company and Logan Sugar Company, both in Utah, merged to form Amalgamated Sugar, and then purchased Oregon Sugar Company in 1902 to fold into the sweet cooperative. By the 1930s the company was operating throughout the west under the name White Satin, the brand still seen in Northwest grocery stores today.

During World War II, the need for sugar skyrocketed as an ingredient essential not just for food and booze but as an industrial product crucial for explosives and synthetic rubber. Amalgamated Sugar convinced farmers in Malheur County to convert their farms to sugar beet monoculture, which in turn created a new labor shortage as so much land would now be thinned and harvested at the exact same time instead of on the seasonal rotation they’d used growing a variety of crops. Of the 125,284 Japanese Americans unjustly incarcerated during the war, around 400 moved to the farm labor camps in Nyssa to work the sugar beet farms in Malheur County — with the conditions that they be paid the going rate and protected from drunk locals. A branch camp for German and Italian POWs was also established in Nyssa to tend and harvest the sugar beets.

Just as our light and flexible spruce wood built the planes for World War I, Northwest sugar — and the people harvesting it — helped win the second World War. Now if only sugar beets could win the war on tooth decay.

Recipe: Spiced pumpkin bread

Decorative gourd season is still very much going strong, but if you leave those pumpkins out on your porch much longer, mark our words, the squirrels will indiscriminately massacre them. Just a complete squash bath. We always love a Thai pumpkin red curry or a West African pumpkin and peanut soup, but this spicy-sweet pumpkin bread is infinitely shareable and perfect for breakfast or everyday snacking with tea. Best of all, once you’ve gutted and roasted a whole pumpkin, you can freeze the puree in one-cup tubs for easy use later. Bonus points if you want to roast (or plant) your own pumpkin seeds — here’s a handy how-to video — but regular store-bought pumpkin seeds are more convenient. Makes one loaf.

Ingredients

Dry stuff:

• 1 ¾ cup all-purpose flour
• ¼ cup whole wheat flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp fine sea salt (or 1 tsp Diamond kosher salt)
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice

Wet stuff:

• 1 cup pumpkin puree (canned is fine)
• ½ cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup milk
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Other stuff:

• ¾ cup pumpkin seeds
• 2 tbsp coarse sparkling sugar (also sold as decorative sparkling sugar)

Instructions

1. Position an oven rack in the middle slot, and preheat your oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9″ x 5″ loaf pan (add a strip of parchment paper if desired).
2. Whisk the dry stuff together in a large mixing bowl until fully combined.
3. Whisk the wet stuff together until fully combined, then make a well in the bowl of dry ingredients and pour in the pumpkin mixture (the wet stuff). Mix until fully combined, taking care not to leave any pockets of flour in the bottom of the bowl.
4. Fold in ½ cup of the pumpkin seeds, then scrape the batter into the prepared loaf pan. Sprinkle the remaining ¼ cup of pumpkin seeds and the sparkling sugar on top of the batter, then bake for 55-60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out dry.
5. Turn the loaf out onto a cooling rack and let it cool for 15-20 minutes before slicing. Store any leftovers in an airtight container and it’ll be good for 4-5 days at room temperature. It’s best served warm smeared with a pat of butter, and goes beautifully with a mug of hot chai.

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