Pumpkin Pie

It's fall and people are eating pumpkin pie, one of those seasonal desserts that is rarely seen any other time of the year. I love the taste of pumpkin in my desserts, but pumpkin pie is one dessert I do not like. Uh, how can I saw this without appearing stupid as usual? Well, I don't like pumpkin pie because it has too much pumpkin taste in it. For me, eating so much pumpkin is like eating a stick of butter. A lot is sometimes too much when it come to pumpkin pie.

Since pumpkins are the symbol of fall, of harvest time and of Halloween, I understand the crazy for all things pumpkin and I participate in that. I made pumpkin bread the other day and a pumpkin smoothie last night. I prefer the lighter, but similar tasting sweet potato pie to pumpkin pie. So pumpkin pie never crosses my lips. Where did the hunger for pumpkin pie among other humans than I begin, I ask? It seems that pumpkin is a native American food and that it was unknown everywhere outside of North America until European explorers in the late 15th century "discovered" America. They sent pumpkin seeds when returning to Europe and those food mad French (or are the French just plain crazy mad) popularized pumpkin as a filling in various foods.

In America the British colonists loved pumpkin and starting making pumpkin pies. There are pumpkin pie recipes in 16th century English cookbooks, but the taste for pumpkin pies never seemed to emigrate outside of England, Canada and the United States.. This makes me wonder if the taste for pumpkin pie in places where it is eaten isn't more of a fall tradition than a taste preference. After all,  China hasn't found an interest in pumpkin pie, one of the few western products not copied or stolen by China from the west.

There are quite a few adages that use pumpkin pie, but I am not sure any is true nor do I know who started them. You may have heard a number of them, but the one most commonly used is something is "as easy as pumpkin pie". Bakers will say that, despite few recipe ingredients and simple technique, cooking a pumpkin pie is not easy at all. But the results when done well pleases quiet a few.  Long ago, he poet Whittier summed it best.

      The Pumpkin (John Greenlief Whittier 1850)

Ah! on Thanksday, when from East and from West,
>From North and from South comes the pilgrim and guest;
When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board
The old broken links of affection restored;
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before;
What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye,
What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?