A lot of US recipes use bizarre amounts of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger-- especially cinnamon. Mostly, I reduce the amount of these spices to a third when I try a recipe. Pumpkin pie made that way is a different beast. I wonder whether the pumpkin haters actually are reacting to the over-spicing. I’m also curious where the trend toward really heavy spicing came from. It’s really pronounced not just in pumpkin pie, but also in apple pie, oatmeal raisin cookies, carrot cake, and so on. Maybe it started as a way of showing that you could afford all that spice, but it could also be the other way around and be a modern way of covering cheap base ingredients, as the tendency is most noticeable in cheap commercial baked goods.
