by Ben Everett
Columbia Daily Spectator
U-Wire
I tried free-associating on the word "pumpkin" this morning, and came up with the following: necromancy, lust, good clean fun, muffins. Weird. But also fitting - pumpkins are strange things. After all, what other fruit takes the pan-American spotlight only two days every year, first as a festive lantern, then as a festive pie? To boot, pumpkins tend to pop up in fairy tales, transmogrified into bulbous carriages or blown up to the size of Volkswagens. It is a madcap fruit.
As far as I'm concerned, though, what's really odd about pumpkins is their low gastronomic visibility; they only regularly show up on American plates as wedges of Thanksgiving pie, tarnished and speckled like rust. But it doesn't have to be this way. Well prepared - and there's a trove of preparations - pumpkins are distinctly delicious. To wit: If I could eat only one food for the rest of my life, it would probably be my mother's pumpkin chocolate-chip muffins: fluted wax-paper cups filled with dollops of gluey pumpkin pulp thickened with white flour, spiced with cinnamon and cardamom, and packed with big milk chocolate chips. After 10 minutes out of the oven, still hot and a little gooey, pumpkin muffins are Mom's answer to ambrosia.
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Pumpkins dishes are actually all over the place, sweet and savory by turns. One of the earliest cracks at fusion cooking before fusion was in vogue, Spanish conquistadors crossing the Andes in the late 1500s cut-and-pasted their traditional grilled meat in broth into the hollowed-out gourds Andean Indians used as ersatz serving bowls. Thus was born the Argentinean dish carbonada en zapallo, a beefy soup with vegetables and peaches, whimsically baked and served in the shell of a pumpkin.
Back in the Old World, pumpkins caught on; for a mere dollar an ounce, Dean and Deluca will sell you a thick melange of Arrope grape must and chunks of candied pumpkin, billed by the purveyors as a centuries-old Moorish legacy.
In Cyprus, popular wallet-sized pastries are filled with pumpkin, crushed wheat and sultana raisins, and eaten hot for breakfast. Most Western countries, in fact, have pumpkin bread in one form or another - a depressing shrink-wrapped slice can even be found at Starbucks.
Though pumpkins are easily baked or stewed into these homey comfort foods, they require some taming for haute cuisine. Still, with their culinary goddammit-we're-number-one-ism, the French refuse to be outdone in any ingredient, even pumpkins: With characteristic panache, Guy Savoy conjured up a recipe for tourte au potiron, traditional pumpkin pie deified with fresh cinderellas, pecans, apples and sheets of puff pastry.
If this is sounding stuffy, remember that pumpkins are fun, too. Good clean third-grade Halloween party jack-o-lantern fun. Yet there's also something vaguely erotic about carving pumpkins - it's just so tactile, with all the spongy flesh, smooth seeds, and slick orange filaments. I offer as proof my mid-pumpkin-carving seduction of a friend one wanton Halloween night.
Nothing but the pumpkin could have explained the success - especially considering I was wearing a giant homemade bumblebee costume at the time.
So pumpkins are delicious, versatile, and just maybe aphrodisiacal. Do college students need any more convincing? Play with them this Oct. 31.
