I ate pumpkins, but wasn't sure why. I was an unexamined pumpkin eater, at least until the other day when I looked deeply into my feelings about the gourd.
The flavor of a pumpkin was not that compelling. At best it was subtle. At worst it was watery. Rather than take the lead in the flavor parade, like chocolate or garlic, pumpkin seemed content to be a consensus player, working in the background to support and carry other flavors.
Flipping through a handful of cookbooks, I found that a fair number of cooks had some of the same vague views of pumpkins I did.
First of all, they weren't sure whether it was a fruit or a vegetable. It seems to be both, depending on the mood of the cook. The best definition I found, and the one that seems to be correct, is that a pumpkin is a gourd, that looks like a fruit but behaves like a vegetable. Or maybe it was the other way around.
The cookbook authors seem to regard the pumpkin as a nice dish. Something that deserved a place on the autumnal table, especially on Thanksgiving. But it was a sidelight, not a star that deserved special treatment. Take, for example, the question of taking the trouble to make your pumpkin pie out of fresh, rather than canned, pumpkin puree.
Some cooks said the only pumpkin worth pureeing, was the so-called sugar, or "neck" pumpkin, the ones with long necks. These twisted pumpkins were uglier than the classic round jack-o-lantern pumpkins. But in pumpkins, as in life, it turned out the gawky ones ended up being sweeter than the slick-lookers.
Not everyone thought that fresh pumpkin puree was all that important in a pie. Susan Herrmann Louis author of the "Farm House Cookbook" (Workman) said it was OK to use plain old jack-o-lantern pumpkins, or oven canned pumpkins in the Amish country pumpkin custard pie she put in her book.
And Lora Broody, in her basic cookbook "Kitchen Survival Guide" (Morrow), said that trying to make pie with jack-o-lantern puree was a mistake. She recommended canned pumpkin pie filling.
Even unabashed pumpkin lovers, like Crescent Dragonwagon, whose "Dairy Hollow House Soup and Breads" (Workman) cookbook was full of recipes for the gourd, had reservations about using fresh sugar pumpkins to make a pie filling.
Anyone who went to the trouble of coring, seeding, steaming and peeling a sugar pumpkin to make a pie filling was better off using butternut squash, she said. Butternut squash has more meat, fewer seeds and more sugar than even the sweetest pumpkins.
