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A Community Newsletter of Tasty Tips, Quips, Recipes, and Ruminations on Food and Cooking

Across the Kitchen Table:

Sorghum: The Maple Syrup of the South

Stocking Up for Holiday Baking

A Celebration of Pumpkins

Pumpkins, native to our hemisphere, actually played a starring role in American history. Everyone learns in history class that Squanto taught the hapless Pilgrims to plant pumpkins and corn together (tossing a herring into each planting hole for fertilizer). But did you know it was pumpkins that saved the settlers from dying in the "starving time" of 1622? No pumpkins, no Pilgrims. The colonists learned to make a simple pumpkin "pie" by scooping out the seeds and fibers, filling the cavity with milk, and baking the pumpkin whole until the milk was absorbed. (This recipe probably improved a lot once the Indians taught the colonists how to make maple syrup.)

The Pilgrims also mashed, dried, stewed, and pickled their pumpkins. One Plymouth Colony poet wrote,

We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon;
If it was not for pumpkins, we should be undone.

Yet how many of us today reach for a can opener instead of a fresh pumpkin when it’s time to make a pumpkin pie or mix the batter for spicy pumpkin bread? To learn more about cooking with fresh pumpkin, we picked up a copy of Gail Damerow’s book, The Perfect Pumpkin (Storey Publishing, Pownal, Vermont, 1997). Recipes in the book take a cook from pumpkin pancakes and pumpkin brioche in the morning to pumpkin soup for lunch and pumpkin dinner rolls at night, topped off by a glass of dry pumpkin wine.

On the Web, most pumpkin sites concentrate on the competition to grow giant pumpkins, especially the famous ‘Dill’s Atlantic Giant’ developed by Howard Dill in Nova Scotia. (These monsters tend NOT to be good eating pumpkins.) For a site that is more of a shrine to pumpkins than anything, go to www.pumpkinnook.com; also www.pumpkinsontheweb.freeservers.com.

Right down the road from us, Keene, New Hampshire, will host a massive Pumpkin Festival on October 28, hoping to break its own world’s record of 17,693 carved and lighted pumpkins on display. For information on this event, go to www.centerstagenh.com. The Pumpkin Festival is a fabulous sight, with thousands of intricately carved pumpkins flickering in the candlelight.

Here is Gail Damerow’s recipe for sweet Pumpkin Pickles, adapted from The Perfect Pumpkin. To brush up on your canning technique, go to www.homecanning.com.

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Mix together:

2 cups cooked or canned pumpkin

1 cup milk

1 cup heavy cream

1/2 cup maple syrup

1/2 white sugar

1-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1-1/2 teaspoons ginger

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon salt

4 well-beaten eggs

1 tablespoon good brandy

Stir together and pour the mixture into a buttered 1-1/2-quart souffle dish (or 10 little custard cups) and place dish or cups in a pan containing an inch of hot water. Bake at 325°F for 50 to 60 minutes (less for cup custards), or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool; chill until ready to serve. Spoon into serving bowls and garnish with whole pecans and sweetened whipped cream. Serves 8 to 10

2 sticks cinnamon

15 whole cloves

2-1/3 cups white vinegar

2-1/3 cups sugar

Steam the pumpkin cubes until just tender (about 10 minutes). Do not overcook. Drain. Place the cinnamon sticks (break as needed) and the cloves in a tea ball or cheesecloth bag and simmer them with the vinegar and sugar for 15 minutes. Add the pumpkin cubes to the mixture and simmer for 3 minutes. Set aside in a cool place for 24 hours. Start water boiling in a canning kettle, and wash and sterilize 7 half-pint jars. Bring the pumpkin cubes and syrup to a boil and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove the spices and pack the pickles into the hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch headroom. Add lids, and process in a boiling water bath for 5 minutes (start timing when water returns to a full boil). Makes about 7 half-pint jars.

Sorghum: The Maple Syrup of the South

Finnish Beer Bread

Every time we visit our relatives in Middle Tennessee, we go home lugging as many jars as we can carry of pure sorghum syrup, a golden liquid made by boiling down the juice of sorghum grass, which is grown throughout the upland South. Old-timers in the South often use the words "sorghum" and "molasses" interchangeably, but your taste buds will tell you that sorghum is lighter and brighter than real molasses (a by-product of sugarcane refining). Sorghum’s taste is as unique as that of pure maple syrup, another type of refined "juice" that sweetens up our life.

The sorghum harvest every fall includes some mighty picturesque celebrations at festivals in Nashville, Tennessee; Blairsville, Georgia; West Liberty, Kentucky, and other spots. For more information and a list of mail-order sources, go to the National Sweet Sorghum Producers and Processors Association web site, www.ca.uky.edu/nssppa.

When we run out of our Tennessee sorghum, we order more from the Sand Mountain Sorghum Company, P. O. Box 824, Scottsboro, Alabama 35768 (256-228-6790), a company run by Ms. Burma Thomas, who inherited it from her father. Six pints of "sorghum molasses" costs $15.84 plus shipping. If you send Ms. Thomas a check, she will send you the sorghum; call first to determine shipping charges for your location.

The time-honored way to consume sorghum is to warm the syrup, melt a pat of butter in it, and then pour it over hot biscuits, pancakes, or cornbread. Mmmmm! You can substitute it for molasses in most recipes. Here’s a favorite bread recipe, adapted for sorghum lovers. It makes four round, sweet, hearty loaves. We got the recipe years ago from our friend Mike Patenaude in Wisconsin.

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12 ounces beer

2/3 cup sorghum

2 cups hot water

1 packet (1 scant tablespoon) dry yeast

2-1/2 teaspoons salt

4 cups rye flour

4 cups white flour

cornmeal

egg wash (1 egg beaten with 1 tablespoon water)

poppyseeds

Instructions....

Mix beer, sorghum, and hot water in a large bowl. Sprinkle yeast over the top and wait for 10 minutes. Stir; add salt and rye flour and stir until flour is moistened. Cover with a damp towel and let stand for 1/2 hour. Stir in white flour, cover again, and let rise for 2 hours. Add enough extra white flour to make a silky dough, and knead for 10 minutes.

Divide into 4 parts. Shape into balls and place on greased baking sheets sprinkled with cornmeal. Let rise for 1 hour. Brush with egg wash and sprinkle with poppyseeds. Bake at 400°F for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 350°F and bake for 25 to 30 minutes longer, until done. Makes 4 round loaves.

Stocking Up for Holiday Baking

Penzeys Spices, P.O. Box 933, Muskego, WI 53150-0933; 800-741-7787; www.penzeys.com. Retail stores in Norwalk, CT; Oak Park, IL; Brookfield and Madison, WI; St. Paul and Minneapolis, MN. Penzeys is simply the very best place to buy the freshest, highest quality spices and herbs, at the best prices. The Penzey family travels the world in search of suppliers, and along the way they wangle recipes for great street food from salsas to sates to pepperpot soup, which makes their catalog great reading. We frequently order ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, whole nutmegs, cumin, coriander, peppercorns, and other staples from them, and once a year we splurge on a package of 15 Madagascar vanilla beans and soak them for three months in vodka or brandy to create rich vanilla extract.

For an array of Italian ingredients and authentic recipes that will make you hungry just looking at the screen, go to www.esperya.com for those special items you can’t find at the supermarket. Whoever writes the product descriptions must moonlight as a romance novelist. For instance, who wouldn’t buy a bottle of Torre Matigge extra-virgin olive oil "that whispers its delicate fruitiness, an oil that conveys the ripeness of the fruit, a delicate and discrete oil, never aggressive"? It went directly into the shopping cart! (At a mere $21.00 for a 25-ounce bottle, and please don’t tell my husband.)

Another favorite when it comes to special cooking and baking supplies is the venerable Maid of Scandinavia, now known as Sweet Celebrations but on the web as www.maidofscandinavia.com. The Maid has everything from bulk almond paste (7 pounds for $49.99) to stovetop krumkake irons (Swedish, $41.50) to Baker’s Ammonia or ammonium nitrate, a leavening agent often called for in old recipes.

Finally, our friends at King Arthur Flour seem to understand all of the secret desires in the hearts of bakers, and their catalog is an inspiration. If you do not live close enough to stop in at the retail store in Norwich, Vermont, shop online at www.KingArthurFlour.com or call 800-827-6836 to get a catalog. Besides top-quality cookware and tools, you can order many types of King Arthur Flour, a New England staple. Besides the basic unbleached flour, we especially love the coarse Irish-style flour and the European-style artisan bread flour. You might feel silly buying flour by mail (the postage costs nearly as much as the flour), but you can’t find this at your grocery store.

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