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Versatile and delicious pumpkins

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Pumpkins were spreading their far-reaching vines, broad leaves, and curly little pigtail tendrils across the high-country landscape long before the first European settler girdled trees or grubbed roots to clear a patch to plant.

The easily grown members of the winter squash family were part of the Cherokee “three sisters” pattern of crop production—tall stalks of corn reached skyward and afforded support for climbing beans of assorted varieties, while underneath pumpkins spread across the ground and kept competing weeds at bay. The symbiosis between the trio of vegetables was vital for all three, and the same held true for the role of pumpkin in Native American diet. Pumpkins could be dried, stored well to provide food through the lean winters, and importantly, were both tasty and healthy.

Pioneers readily recognized the versatility of pumpkins and they became an integral part of agricultural life for every self-sufficient family living in close connection with the land. At fall’s harvest time, with fodder in the shock and corn in the crib, pumpkins were used in various fashions. They weren’t the highly colorful and decorative ones featured in connection with decorative displays and Halloween in today’s world. They were for consumption, and it was taste, not appearance, that mattered most.

The majority of the autumnal harvest of pumpkins were stored for future use. Sometimes this involved canneries or smoke houses, perhaps pumpkins were nestled in beds of straw and covered with corn fodder, or they might be placed in a basement or an unheated back room in the house where they were out of the way. Some would be dried; others found their way into pumpkin butter—ideally suited for spreading atop a halved cathead biscuit. Even those that began to go bad had a purpose. They went straight to the hog trough, as did those showing blemishes or other inferiorities when harvested.

A good variety of what were variously called sweet pumpkins, garden pumpkins, or eating pumpkins was something to be treasured. For example, years ago a dear friend of mine, Christine Proctor, graciously shared seeds of what she styled Chambers Creek pumpkins. The name came from a small stream that feeds into the north shore of Fontana Lake and the area where she was raised in pre-Great Smoky Mountains National Park days. The seed stock, which is at least a century old and in all likelihood of appreciably greater vintage, produces a pumpkin with all the key characteristics for use on the table. They are sweet, productive and easy to grow, work up nicely, and have flesh that is far less stringy than the norm. It has been my go-to pumpkin ever since, with seeds being carefully saved from one season to the next.

Pumpkin Soup

Combine water and chicken stock in a sauce pot and add pumpkin, potato, and salt. Cook for about 45 minutes or until vegetables are soft. Mash vegetables with potato masher or spoon to desired consistency. Add cream and cook for three minutes. Cooked soup can also be blended for a smoother consistency.

Pumpkin Souffle

Combine the first six ingredients and mix well. Pour into a buttered baking dish. Combine the remaining ingredients, incorporating butter until you reach a coarse crumb consistency. Sprinkle mixture on pumpkin puree and bake at 350 degrees until top is brown, about 25 to 30 minutes.

This can be served as a sweet side dish, similar to a sweet potato casserole, or as a dessert.

Pumpkin Butter

What were commonly known as butters have seemingly faded from the food scene, despite a general resurgence of interest in old-time approaches to foodstuffs and increased usage of traditional foods and recipes. With the noteworthy exception of apple butter, that is certainly true of a wide variety of traditional adornments for biscuits, pancakes and the like, once commonly canned by mavens of mountain kitchens. Making butters—a thick and savory fruit sauce from apples, peaches, pears, plums, candy roasters and pumpkins—require a lot of prep time and stirring, but are well worth the effort.

Here’s an approach I think you’ll find worth your time, and it might be noted that pumpkin butter, when canned in half pint jars, makes a dandy hostess gift or addition to a gift basket.

Mix all of the ingredients except the pectin together until fully smooth. Bring to a boil and cook for one minute. Remove and blend in the pectin, making certain to mix thoroughly. Place in previously sterilized jars. Melt paraffin and spoon a thin layer atop the butter before applying lids and allowing to seal.

Pumpkin Bread

I don’t recall ever having pumpkin bread in my boyhood, but I’ve eaten more pumpkin prepared this way in the last three or four decades than any other. It’s delightful as a snack, a breakfast food topped with cream cheese, or as a dessert. I also like slices toasted in the oven just long enough to make them slightly crispy on the edges, with a dab of butter on top to melt.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour two 9-by-5-by-3 inch loaf pans. Pour sugar and oil in large bowl and blend before mixing in eggs and pumpkin. Sift flour, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a separate bowl. Gradually and thoroughly stir into the pumpkin mixture while adding the walnuts.

Divide the batter equally between the two pans and bake for an hour or a bit more until a tester inserted into the center of the loaves comes away clean. Transfer to cooling racks and after allowing the loaves to cool for 10 or 15 minutes, use a knife to cut around the edges and turn loaves out onto the racks to cool completely.

Pumpkin Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

This recipe requires considerable effort, but rest assured the end result is worth the labor. Moist, tasty, and redolent of all fall’s comforting flavors, it will be a hit even with folks who insist they don’t like pumpkin.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease and flour two nine-inch cake pans. In a mixing bowl whisk together the flour, sugar, bakes powder, salt, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Form a hollow in the center of these dry ingredients and into it pour the oil and eggs. Whisk this together and then add the pumpkin, stirring until thoroughly mixed. Pour into the cake pans and bake for 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes away from the center clean. Let the baked cakes cool on rack for 10 minutes and then, with the aid of a spatula if needed, slip around the edges of the pans and remove the cakes. Let set for an hour.

When this period is over, add cream cheese icing or, if you prefer, caramel icing, using your favorite recipe for either one. Yet another alternative is to serve in without icing using apple sauce, whipped cream or even warmed sorghum syrup as an “adornment.” If desired (and I always desire) sprinkle black walnut meats atop the cake and press some into the side as well.

Pumpkin Pie

This traditional Thanksgiving dish was a fixture with the Casada family.  We always had four or five choices of dessert come the holiday time of feasting, but this was one of my favorites.  We grew our own pumpkins as well as Grandpa Joe raising cushaws, and the “meat” from the latter will also work in this recipe. Momma would prepare three or four of these pies at a time, and they vanished as if by magic.

Add the sugar and seasonings to the pumpkin and mix well.  Then add the slightly beaten eggs and the milk. Lastly stir in the melted butter. Turn into a pie plate lined with pastry and bake in a 425-degree oven for five minutes. Then lower the heat to 350 degrees and bake until the filling is set. The pie should be allowed to cool prior to serving.

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Having been raised by parents who reached early adulthood in the depths of the Depression and for whom frugality was a byword, I’ve always been a staunch adherent to the “waste not, want not” school of thinking where food is involved. That certainly applies to saving seeds rather than buying them, and to utilizing garden bounty to the fullest possible extent. Recipes deal primarily with pumpkin flesh, but it’s a mistake to overlook the toothsome seeds inside these members of the winter squash family. The seeds are nutritious, and make a fine snack.

To prepare pumpkin seeds, put them aside when you work up pumpkin, and while the flesh is roasting in the oven, take some time to separate the seeds from the stringy fiber to which they are attached. Save plenty for pumpkin planting in the next garden cycle (putting them in a small bag and storing them in the freezer assures viability) and toast the rest. To do this, lightly coat the cleaned seeds in cooking oil, spread them out atop a cookie sheet, sprinkle with salt, and place in a 375-degree oven (you can do this right after your roasted flesh is ready, thereby avoiding the necessity of reheating the oven). Toast until they begin to show a hint of brown, and remove. The seeds can be eaten whole or, if you have the patience, cracked and the kernel removed. I eat them whole and figure that along with the fine taste I’m getting some fiber.

You can roast smaller quantities of seeds in a frying pan atop a stove.

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