Pumpkins are not just for Hallowe'en

...here's what to do with the rest

The pumpkin, as 16th century herbalist John Gerard informed those curious about the New World’s vegetables, is an earthy, comfortable vegetable fit for a "robustious and rusticke people".  You get the message.  This is no fly-by-night flippertigibbet but a solid addition to the culinary vocabulary of the rural population of the Old World, a sweet and toothsome alternative to the ubiquitous winter roots, particularly the ever-present turnip.  

The newcomer - adaptable, easy-growing, storable, edible in all its parts including leaves and seeds - settled happily into the warmer corners of the Old World's vegetable patch. Better still, pumpkin is everyone's friend, delighted to take on the characteristics of the company it keeps: you can tell how people really like to cook by the way they treat their pumpkins. 

The English baked it into their beloved apple pie (in Yorkshire, it comes with a slab of cheese slipped under the lid) The French layered it into the winter garbure, beat it to a puree with butter and cream, and crystalized the skin with sugar. The Germans made it into smooth winter soup (lightly-soured with vinegar, no cream) to warm the belly before dishing up the apple dumpling. Italy, ever-inventive, stuffed it into the ravioli, slipped it into the midday minestrone and added it to the caponata (delicious, as above). Spain stirred it into the puchero and chopped it into the pisto. The Portuguese made into mermelada - a quick-growing replacement for their beloved quince-paste - served with cheese but also to sweeten the talk at weddings (always a risk). Sophisticated Austrian chefs - who took lessons in pastry-making from the Ottomans - combine it with apples in their hand-spun strudels.

Eastern Europe has other ideas, as I observed when driving south from Vienna towards Belgrade in autumn in the 1980's, before communism emptied the fields and depopulated the villages. In the fields on either side of the highway, small groups of women, aproned and kerchiefed, were sitting together on upturned crates, scooping out the woolly middles of great pyramids of over-ripe pumpkins, separating out the seeds and discarding the rest in soggy heaps on the ground.

 What was the reason, I enquired, for what looked like using a food-stuff the wrong way round?  “We mill the seeds for oil. Whatever else?" Some people just use the flesh as a vegetable, I offered, or even as a filling for a festive pie. “Really?” Yes indeed. There was, I continued helpfully, a famous American recipe for pumpkin pie that's eaten on the day when people give thanks for delivery from trouble. What kind of trouble? Any trouble. Discussing trouble under communism was not appropriate. 

Which was also true of pie prepared with pumpkin.

"We don't eat the pulp. We feed it to the cattle.” 

Question and answer, I should explain, can be conveyed pictorially in much the same way as our ancestors drew prey-animals on cave-walls - a trick I've always find useful when I don't have the language.

Pumpkin oil, roasted or raw, was used throughout the Balkans to dress salads (gorgeous on finely-shredded cabbage), enrich bread (good in a nut-loaf), to shorten pastry and, by the sophisticated cooks of Austria, as a simple sauce for grilled game that would otherwise be dry.  When milled fresh and untoasted, it must be used within days. When the seeds have been roasted before milling, the oil us as dark as cooked-down maple-syrup and the flavour is astonishingly rich and nutty. Even when roasted, pumpkin oil is not a good keeper: once opened, keep it in the fridge.

Unblemished pumpkins, if stored in a cool place in a current of air away from the central heating, will keep good until well into the new year.  Victorian gardeners suspended their prize-winning monsters, marrows as well as pumpkins, in slings hanging from a roof-beam in the cellar until the earth warms up at Easter. As herbalist John Gerard explained to his sixteenth century readership, pumpkin is useful stuff. Sweetness, softness and (most particularly) a conciliatory way with its culinary companions, serves a reminder that spring follows winter and good things will surely come.

p.s. beloved paid subscribers (you know who you are, your support keeps me writing, and I'm very grateful!) will shortly be in receipt of three regional recipes for pumpkin and cinnamon pasties with olive oil pastry (Cyprus); ravioli with pumpkin and sage (Emilia-Romagna); pumpkin and apple strudel (Vienna). So don’t forget to save the scoopings from the Hallowe'en lantern, and happiness will follow.

p.p.s. More stories and recipes in Seasonal Cooking (previously known as Festival Food and now in print with my watercolour illustrations from Grub Street - bless their little cotton socks).  See you next week!