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It makes me sad that my Celtic ancestors did not have pumpkins. Oh, the Old World magic they’d have made of them if they had. To make their autumn lanterns and carved faces, they had to use turnips and rutabagas.
Once pumpkins were discovered, though, by the first European explorers to sail to the New World, pumpkin seeds made their way back to Europe very quickly. There is a painting of a relative of a pumpkin in a book painted for French royalty in about 1508. Like turnips, for many years pumpkins were seen as food for poor people and fodder for livestock. But by the late 17th century, French cooks were experimenting with pumpkin recipes.
It was in 1697 when Charles Perrault first wrote of a pumpkin being turned into a carriage — an innovation in the Cinderella story, which is much older than 1697. Thomas Jefferson grew several types of pumpkins at Monticello.
It surprises me how little country people here in North Carolina know about pumpkins these days. They buy the ugly, inedible, bright orange variety (Howden pumpkins) for Halloween. And they often use “heirloom” pumpkins to decorate their porches. But they no longer see pumpkins as a food to be bought fresh and cooked from scratch. Of course they like pumpkin pie, but virtually everyone buys canned pumpkin for pies, which they put into a store-bought pie shell, something that ought to be a felony crime against nature. (Libby’s uses Dickinson pumpkins for canning.)
The woman who weighed the pumpkins I bought yesterday didn’t even know about baking pumpkins as the best way to acquire pumpkin for pies. It ought to be obvious: Cut a lid in the top of the pumpkin, clean out the seeds through the hole in the top, then replace the lid and bake the pumpkin. At 325F, the pumpkin will need to stay in the oven for an hour or more, depending on the pumpkin’s size. It’s easy enough to press the excess water out of the pumpkin flesh. And that pumpkin juice should go into soup. It has been years since I serve pumpkin soup in a pumpkin tureen. Maybe I’ll do that this fall.
August weather has lingered into late September, and it’s too hot this week to bake a pumpkin. But next week there will be pumpkin soup and pumpkin pie.
This farm near King, North Carolina, sells strawberries in the spring and pumpkins in the fall. Click here for high-resolution version.
