Tag Archives: baked pumpkin.

When Pumpkin was Pumpion

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Pumpkins

Heirloom, eating pumpkins may not all be orange. Photo by Jeremy Seitz form Flickr

It is October and the great pumpkin attack has begun. Not content with pumpkin pie– or here in the Southwest, pumpkin empanadas– the orange army pops up everywhere. Pumpkin breakfast cereal, pumpkin cider, pumpkin lattes, pumpkin sausages (!?!), pumpkin tortilla chips. If you eat it, Trader Joe’s and Starbucks and everywhere you turn will be injecting pumpkin into it.

My daughter-in-law, Rene, revels in all this.  I find it partly amusing and partly annoying.

But on second thought, the proliferation of pumpkin everything just emphasizes what our ancestor knew. Pumpkin is endlessly versatile.  In fact, thanks to pumpkin knowledge shared by the Native Americans with our earliest settlers, our great-great-grands lived through many a New England and Northwest Territory winter.

An ancestor of mine whose family were early settlers in the Northwest Territory wrote about his experiences as a boy, and the food they existed on. Along with game and root vegetables, “Great use was made of pumpkin.  We used to cut up and dry a great quantity of pumpkin.”

Pumpkin As a Side Dish

Here’s how they might have cooked pumpkin over a fire, and some facts about pumpkin as a survival food.  Also some useful tips for cooking pumpkin today.

Stuffed Pumpkin

pumpkin macaroni

Pumpkin stuffed with macaroni and cheese

Back in the mid 19th century, cooks liked to stuff things inside of other things–a tradition that goes back about as far as we can trace cooking, at least to the Romans.  But this recipe that bakes macaroni inside a pumpkin is a strictly modern and simply heavenly adaptation of that principle.

Pumpkn Cornbread

Pumpkin Cornbread

Robin Benzle’s Pumpkin Pecan Cornbread

Last year, I discovered a simple recipe for pumpkin corn bread that quickly became my favorite. In fact, it edges out the previous favorite, cranberry-pumpkin bread by a tiny margin. Although it is not a traditional recipe–it uses Jif Cornbread Mix for heaven’s sake–it gets its goodness from ingredients our ancestors in aprons would have used frequently–cornmeal, molasses and pumpkin. (Be sure to make the molasses butter to go with the cornbread!)

Pumpkin Cranberry Bread

This recipe caught my eye in a magazine ad, and I clipped it and taped it to a cupboard door long ago.  It is moist and adaptable to your family’s taste. Adjust to your tolerance of spice and nuts.

Cranberry Pumpkin Bread

Print recipe
Serves 20
Prep time 20 minutes
Cook time 1 hour, 5 minutes
Total time 1 hour, 25 minutes
Allergy Egg, Tree Nuts, Wheat
Meal type Bread
Misc Child Friendly, Freezable, Pre-preparable, Serve Cold
A rich bread that is a great addition to Thanksgiving menu, combining two traditional favorites--pumpkin and cranberry sauce.

Ingredients

  • 3 1/2 cups white flour
  • 1 2/3 cup sugar
  • 2 teaspoons baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon (or substitute 2 tsp pumpkin pie spice for cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and allspice.)
  • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 1/4 teaspoon cloves
  • 1/4 teaspoon allspice
  • 3/4 teaspoons salt
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1 16-oz can pumpkin ((not pumpkin pie mix))
  • 1 16-oz can cranberry sauce (whole berry sauce)
  • 2/3 cups vegetable oil
  • 4 eggs

Optional

  • 3/4 cups pecans (chopped)

Directions

1. In large bowl, whisk together, flour, sugar, soda, spices, salt and baking powder.
2. In second bowl, stir together remaining ingredients until well mixed. Add pumpkin mixture to flour mixture and stir well.
3. Pour batter into two greased loaf pans (9 1/4" x 5" x 2"). Bake at 350 degrees F for 65 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean.
4. Cool in pans 10 minutes then remove to cooling rack.
5. When cool, drizzle glaze over top if you wish. If freezing, freeze before glazing.
6. Optional Glaze: Mix 1 Cup sifted powdered sugar, 1/4 cup undiluted orange juice concentrate and 1/8 tsp allspice until smooth.

Note

Cranberry pumpkin bread is moist and rich. I personally think it stands on its own, so I never add the orange glaze to the cranberry pumpkin read as was recommended in the magazine recipe I clipped long ago.

You can bake the cranberry pumpkin bread in a pyrex 9 x 13 flat pan rather than loaf pans, if you prefer.

Adjust the spices to your liking.

Freezes great, so I make it several weeks before Thanksgiving. One less thing to worry about on the day.

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Spectacular Pumpkin Macaroni Dish

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There are certain ingredients that I return to again and again in these pages because our ancestors depended on them for sustenance. One is the pumpkin.  You may remember the paean to pumpkin I quoted last year in the article calling pumpkins, Survival Food on the Ohio Frontier.

Stead of pottage and puddings and custards and pies
Our pumpkins and parsnips are common supplies,
We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon,
If it were not for pumpkins we should be undoon.

Poem written in 1630s America,  from History.org article on pumpkins .

pumpkin macaroni

Pumpkin stuffed with macaroni and cheese

The recipe for pumpkin macaroni and cheese that I am sharing today has no other relation to pioneers other than the fact that it is a pumpkin. I found this on the cooking site of my friend Stephanie Stiavetti last year, and such a delicious recipe deserves to be shared.

If you are looking for a really spectacular dish to put on your holiday table–this pumpkin stuffed with macaroni and cheese fills the bill. Not only that, it only looks fancy.  It is really a very easy recipe–once you get the darned strings and seeds out of the pumpkin.

Be sure to read the notes with the pumpkin macaroni and cheese recipe to get some more ideas about how you can make the recipe your own. Cook like our ancestors. Use what you have on hand.

pumpkin macaroni

Pie Pumpkins

And keep in mind when our great-grandmothers cooked pumpkin, they weren’t cooking those thin-walled, tasteless things that we’ve been buying to carve jack-o-lanterns. Their pumpkins were smaller and meatier and tastier.  It is only in more recent times that the taste and bake-ability was bred out of pumpkins.  Now, fortunately, you can get the good cooking pumpkins once again.

Macaroni in a Pumpkin

Print recipe
Macaroni in a Pumpkin
Serves 6-10
Prep time 45 minutes
Cook time 1 hour, 30 minutes
Total time 2 hours, 15 minutes
Allergy Milk
Dietary Vegetarian
Meal type Main Dish, Side Dish
Misc Child Friendly, Pre-preparable, Serve Hot
Occasion Halloween, Thanksgiving
Website The Culinary Life
A spectacular dish to bring to the table and a recipe with great flexibility. One you have scooped out the pumpkin, everything else is super easy.

Ingredients

  • 1 or 2 Pumpkins (Pie pumpkin or sugar pumpkin--NOT carving kind. See Note.)
  • sea salt
  • pepper
  • 4oz elbow macaroni
  • 5oz fontina cheese (See Note.)
  • 2oz Gruyere cheese (See Note.)
  • 1 teaspoon fresh rosemary (chopped, or 1/2 tsp dried)
  • 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves (or 1/2 tsp dried)
  • 1/2 teaspoon marjoram leaves (or 1/4 tsp dried)
  • 1 cup half and half (or heavy cream)
  • 1/4lb mild Italian sausage (optional)
  • 3 scallions (chopped, optional)

Directions

Baking pumpkin
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cut "Lid" from pumpkin as if you are going to make a Jack-o-lantern, and remove seeds and strings as best you can. Generaously salt and pepper the inside of the pumpkin.
2. Put the top back on and put pumpkins on rimmed baking sheet lined with foil. Bake for 45 minutes for one larger and 30 minutes for two smaller pumpkins.
Preparing filling.
3. If using sausage, brown crumbled sausage in a spoonful of olive oil. Remove with slotted spoon and drain liquid.
Preparing filling
4. Cook macaroni according to directions. When cooked al dente, drain and rinse with cool water to stop the cooking.
5. Cut cheeses in 1/4 inch cubes, toss with herbs and scallions, macaroni (and cooked sausage) in a bowl.
2nd Bakiing
6. When the pumpkin is done--just beginning to yield to a fork on the inside, but not mushy--take it out of oven and fill with the pasta filling
2nd Baking
7. Scoop filling into pumpkin or pumpkins and pour cream over. Put top back on. Return to oven and bake one hour for one large pumpkin, or 45 minutes for smaller ones. Fifteen minutes before finished, remove top to let the filling brown slightly. If it seems too liquid, let continue to bake another 10-15 minutes.
Serving
8. Serve sliced in sections, or scoop out the inside, including some of the pumpkin in each serving.
Make ahead
9. Stephanie at www.theculinarylife.com suggests you can make the filling ahead of time and refrigerate until the day of the dinner. Then bake the pumpkin and fill as directed above.

Note

Besides being the most beautiful dish you can put on your Halloween or Thanksgiving table, this recipe is a gift to the cook because it is quite easy to make and very flexible.

Cheese: Stephanie Stiavetti, whose website Http://www. theculinarylife was my source (from which I deviated freely), suggests using 5 ounces of Fontina and two ounces of Gruyere. I did make it that way and it was deliciously creamy.

I also tried it with 5 ounces of Gouda and 3 ounces of Asiago.  Stephanie basically says "use whatever you have on hand", mentioning cheddar, Monterey Jack, Swiss cheese, Jarlsberg. Another person made it with aged cheddar and chorizo and chipotle.  Do your own thing!

Herbs: The same advice holds true for the herbs.  I grow a few herbs, so used what I had--fresh thyme, marjoram and oregano. We don't care for sage, which was part of Stephanie's rosemary, thyme and sage suggestion.

Cream: I used half and half this time, but did follow Stephanie's instructions to use heavy cream the first time I made the recipe. It all depends on how adventurous you are feeling, although admittedly the heavy cream adds a lot to the creamy texture.

The only place where I would definitely not compromise is in the use of a pie pumpkin or sugar pumpkin instead of a jack-o-lantern pumpkin. The thicker-walled baking pumpkins are becoming easier to find in stores, and are far superior for baking to the pumpkins bred for carving with their emphasis on thinner walls and little taste.

Now go wow your guests!

 

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Pumpkin Recipes: Survival Food on the Ohio Frontier

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Stead of pottage and puddings and custards and pies
Our pumpkins and parsnips are common supplies,
We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon,
If it were not for pumpkins we should be undoon.

Poem written in 1630s America,  from History.org article on pumpkins .

When the settlers from New England first arrived in Marietta, in the Northwest Territory about 1790, Indian wars were raging.  They had no easy trade with the east, their livestock was constantly in danger, they had to clear dense Ohio woods before they could plant vegetables, and then take the chance of going out of their forts to tend to their gardens. Even hunting was risky, said Benjamin Franklin Stone in his memoir of the pioneers of Israel Stone’s family.

Ohio Forest

Ohio Forest. Photo by Ben Millett from Flickr

In his autobiography, B.F. Stone says

Principle items of food were Indian bread, pork, potatoes and other garden sauce, occasional venison, bear and raccoon, opossums, squirrels, wild turkeys.

The war prevented us hunting much in the woods.  No apples, peaches or other cultivated fruits until the trees had time to grow from seed.

Great use was made of pumpkin.  We used to cut up and dry a great quantity of pumpkin.  Corn in the milk was dried for winter and spring.  Pumpkins, melons and garden vines grew more luxuriously [than in the middle 19th century.]

In the late 18th century, when my Ohio ancestors were depending on pumpkin recipes to keep them alive, the Europeans still disdained pumpkin, recently introduced to them, as food for the poor.

Like so many frontier foods, housewives found many ways to keep their family from getting bored with pumpkin. Not an easy task since pumpkin recipes benefit from sweetening and if ever two flavors were meant to go together, it is pumpkin and cinnamon.  if they had any cinnamon, it would have been in short supply, and for sweetening, they probably had to depend on maple syrup or honey once they ran out of the small amount of sugar they brought along, as it would be a while before traders would be delivering molasses to the frontier settlements.

Pumpkins

Heirloom, eating pumpkins may not all be orange. Photo by Jeremy Seitz form Flickr

I found a great article at History.org, the website of Historic Williamsburg, with a very complete history of the use of pumpkin in America, from American Indians to today. Here’s a 17th century view of one way  pumpkins were cooked.

“A visitor to New England in 1674 wrote:

The Housewives manner is to slice them when ripe, and cut them into dice, and so fill a pot with them of two or three Gallons, and stew them upon a gentle fire a whole day, and as they sink, they fill again with fresh Pompions, not putting any liquor to them; and when it is stew’d enough, it will look like bak’d Apples; this they Dish, putting Butter to it, and a little Vinegar, (with some Spice, as Ginger, &c.) which makes it tart like an Apple.”

Today we tend to limit ourselves to pumpkin already stewed and canned and to a pumpkin recipe on the can’s label for pie. Or maybe we munch on salted pumpkin seeds, removed when the kids made jack-o-lanterns. Our more versatile ancestors were using pumpkin recipes for side dishes, or stuffed pumpkin with various fillings eaten as a main dish.

But we are not just being lazy when we choose pumpkin in a can.  Pumpkins in America have been for decades bred for making jack-o-lanterns–sturdiness taking precedence over taste. And the thinner walls suitable for carving mean you don’t get as much pumpkin meat.  So if you’re going to cook up some pumpkin from scratch, be sure that you find a store that sells eating pumpkins–perhaps labeled “heirloom” or you will definitely be disappointed.

What we call pumpkin pie, was known by them as pumpkin pudding. It just happened to be baked in a “paste”, which we call by the finished name–crust. The article from Williamsburg points out that the Amelia Simmons American cookbook in 1796 gave a recipe for pumpkin pudding that sounds almost identical to the pie filling you can find on the label of the canned pumpkin today. There are some things that you just can’t really improve on.

DRINKING YOUR PUMPKIN

“…the Pilgrims seem to have been first to make pumpkin beer or ale. A later stanza of the poem quoted above provides evidence that they were versatile with their ingredients:

If Barley be wanting to make into Malt, We must be contented and think it no Fault, For we can make liquor to sweeten our Lips Of Pumpkins and Parsnips and Walnut-Tree Chips.

The Pilgrim recipe was said to involve a mixture of persimmons, hops, maple syrup, and, of course, pumpkin. Further south in Virginia, planter Landon Carter mentions pumpkins in his diary in 1765. He, too, concocted some sort of alcoholic beverage from fermented pumpkins. He christened it pumperkin.” [This information also from the history.org article. ]

Boy, I wouldn’t mind having a taste of pumperkin.  That sounds delicious!

PUMPKIN RECIPES

NOTE: Be sure you’re buying eating pumpkins rather than jack o’ lantern pumpkins when you try these recipes. And if you want to try pumpkin in more modern recipes, try substituting it fro butternut squash in any recipe.

PUMPKIN RESEARCH NOTES

History.org article on pumpkins from Colonial Williamsburg Journal Autumn 09.

The website  Jas. Townsend and Son made the video. At their online store, theysell items for American Revolution recreators. They carry cooking and eating necessities including some ingredients and cookbooks and DVDs for recreating the 18th century kitchen. (Video is available on you tube).

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Stone, excerpt from New England Magazine, both available at Google Books for search.