The American origin of hummingbird cake is well documented and surprisingly recent. The recipe was submitted to Southern Living magazine in 1978 by a reader named Mrs. L.H. Wiggins of Greensboro, North Carolina, and it went on to become the most requested recipe in the magazine’s history — a distinction it held for decades. For a publication that is essentially the canonical record of Southern American home baking, that is a meaningful achievement. The recipe spread through community cookbooks, church fundraisers, and family recipe boxes throughout the South, becoming a regional staple within a generation.

The Jamaican connection is where the cake’s history gets more interesting. Before it arrived in Southern Living, a very similar cake called Doctor Bird Cake existed in Jamaica — Doctor Bird being the national bird of Jamaica, a species of hummingbird. The Jamaican Tourist Board distributed a recipe for the cake in press kits sent to American food editors in the 1960s and 70s as part of a broader effort to promote Jamaican tourism and cuisine. Whether Mrs. Wiggins encountered that recipe or arrived at the same combination independently is unknown, but the resemblance is close enough that the Jamaican origin of the flavor profile is widely acknowledged.

What the American South did with the cake was fold it into its own baking tradition so thoroughly that it now reads as native. The addition of cream cheese frosting — a Southern instinct applied to nearly any layer cake — and the specific combination of pecans and warm spice pushed it in a direction that is distinctly Southern even if the fruit combination originated elsewhere.

• Afro-Caribbean

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Regional Roots

• Jamaica