Pumpkins, fairy stories and recipes

"A fat round pumpkin is used both as a candlelit ghoul at All Hallows and as a fairytale stagecoach to whisk Cinderella to the ball" Nigel Slater

"In Britain the pumpkin still has a stronger association with ghosts and goblins than it does soup." Nigel Slater

Indeed. So much so that when I first came to Australia and entered a greengrocer's which had pumpkins lined up on a shelf I had to ask what they were. I really did not know, as we never had pumpkins back then in England, although I knew of them from fairy tales. As you can imagine the shop owner was somewhat amazed at my ignorance.

And yes, this is a Nigel Slater based post. It begins with a story which I had marked with one of my little post-it stickers, from his book Tender Volume 1. I think I marked it more for the story than the actual recipe, but, that said, the recipe is not to be ignored and will be dealt with later. I hope the picture at left conveys some of the atmosphere of the story.

"An hour after leaving Dijon, I was lost. A tangle of lanes, endless vineyards and a low mist left me confused and desperately looking for a farm at which to ask for directions.

It wasn't the most poetic of farmyards, but there was dry mud and clean straw underfoot and tight bales of hay on which were perched a hundred or more fat, round pumpkins soaking up the late-afternoon sun like a group of ladies in a Beryl Cook painting. I whistled and called without reply; not even a dog barked. As I waited, the pumpkins seemed to be watching me, growing faintly malevolent in the fading golden light. I felt like a lost child in a haunting fairy tale. Whether it was the watching fruits or the deserted farm that spooked me, I got back in the car and left as fast as I could. Thirty years on, I think of them in an altogether friendlier light, but they are still what I want at Halloween and on Guy Fawkes Night."

The recipe is this rather glorious looking dish with the simple title of Sausage and a pumpkin mash which can be found on the My Madeleine website. After his little story he says that:

"I came up with this modern take on the classic sausage and mash a year or two ago in an attempt to pacify a herd of boisterous and hungry kids that descended on me in October. It worked."

and which the writer of My Madeleine describes as:

"the simplest of dinners, one that took barely any time to throw together, but filled the house with a sweet and salty aroma, a meaty smell, a hungry smell, a scent that promised satisfaction."

I have a quarter of a pumpkin in my fridge and sausages in the freezer so maybe I'll try it one night next week. But then again maybe not. We'll see.

Still on recipes - whilst I was looking for that one I came across two other variations - one from Nigel himself Mustard and lemon sausages with carrot mash on the BBC Good Food website, which Nigel describes thus:

"Sausage, roasted with a sauce made of mustard, honey, and lemon. Pumpkin, (or, in this case, butternut squash), steamed and then mashed with butter, salt, pepper, and (my addition of) a glob of sour cream. I served the dish with an arugula salad dressed in a simple lemon vinaigrette." Nigel Slater

And then there was this one from Jamie Oliver, which also tapped into stories and Guy Fawkes Night - Squash mash and sausage catherine wheels although Jamie invests the sausages with the mythic rather than the pumpkin - or in this case, the squash. They're different you know. Pumpkins are winter and generally round, Squash are summery and much more varied - butternut, courgettes, patty pan squash ...

I miss Guy Fawkes night. It was a magical, mysterious thing. I didn't like the banging kind of firework, but I loved the rockets that whistled into the sky, and the catherine wheels that whizzed on the garden fence. As well as the sparklers which we were allowed to hold in our hands and draw vanishing, sparkling circles in the air. Not to mention the potatoes baked in the fire. But pumpkin there was none - nor Halloween either.

Britain didn't do Halloween. We had no need because we had Guy Fawkes - kids wheeling their home-made Guys around the neighbourhood, yelling 'penny for the guy'. We also made a guy, stuffed with rags, and dressed in clothes that were falling apart but I don't think we were allowed to do the 'penny for the guy' thing. Alas backyard bonfires and fireworks are no longer allowed for safety reasons, which I understand, but which is also a bit sad. Guy Fawkes night still survives in Britain though with massive community bonfires, processions and fireworks.

But as usual I digress. There is a lot of food writing that talks about the importance of stories - mostly along the lines of cultural roots, how food evokes memories of times gone by in one's life, and so on, but in the last short time I have also come across a few, which like that Nigel Slater story about the pumpkins evoke fairy stories, myths and legends. Magic in other words I suppose.

Diana Henry's book, Roast Figs, Sugar Snow, which I have just finished reading, talks about this here and there. Indeed it ends with sugar snow - an American treat where warm maple syrup is poured on to clean snow, where it freezes to form a kind of toffee which is scooped up and hungrily devoured. She describes how, on a trip to Wisconsin she came across a community sugar-on-snow party:

"where there would be warm cider, baked ham and potatoes, maple-baked beans, doughnuts, sugar-on-snow and dill pickles. (Dill pickles are the archetypal accompaniment to sugar-on-snow, cleansing your palate before you take the next mouthful of toffeed maple.)"

A kind of ancient magic. Primitive almost. It's a book about winter food - and I will give it a post all of its own shortly, but for today just two recipes from the section on Earthly Pleasures - pumpkin, squash, beans and lentils, well the pumpkin section thereof: Juniper-roast quail with pumpkin matefaims - on the Sporting Road website. Alas no picture but somehow juniper is magical to me - and look - matefaims - about which I wrote the other day. These are a bit different in that they are made with pumpkins not potatoes.

The second recipe I'm featuring is her Pumpkin tarts with spinach and gorgonzola as posted in the Irish Examiner. Maybe not quite as magical, or fairy tale but certainly warm and comforting and rather beautiful.

Today is an almost wintry day. A perfect day for pumpkin I guess, but tonight we have to finish some leftovers of leftovers. Maybe next week some time.

Diana Henry's book is smaller than Nigel's hefty Tender tome, and so she does not have quite as many pumpkin recipes as Nigel, who has many. One of which A warm pumpkin scone for a winter's afternoon I have written about before. Of the ten or so recipes from Nigel I'm choosing just one more to feature: A pumpkin pangrattato with rosemary and orange which you can find on the Bon Appétit website and also on a website called The Boatshed Chronicles, which I think I have come across before, where the writer adapted it to become Pumpkin pangrattato with merguez sausages and black olives. Which she excuses thus:

"Of course you know that I can't leave well enough alone, and when I saw pumpkin mash with sausages on the very next page, I was convinced that I somehow had to work sausages into this dish."

I think Nigel would have approved. Nigel on the left, Sue of the New Zealand Boatshed Chronicles on the right.

Nigel Slater calls himself 'a writer who cooks' which is perhaps why I am such a fan. I love his stories and his writing. So much so that I have occasionally considered proffering one of his books as 'my book' for one of my two bookgroups.

The story of the pumpkins in the farmyard, could indeed be completely made up. How would I know? However, from his latest book A Thousand Feasts, which is 'a memoir of sorts', with no recipes, one discovers that he writes things down in his. probably now hundreds, of notebooks, to be refined and probably rewrittten over and over before publication, to accompany a recipe or introduce a book or a section of a book. In that way he preserves his memories - maybe later to embroider them, maybe he even misremembers them as in my tale of hot - no espresso - honey, yesterday.

I have never kept a diary. I have started one a few times, but never got further than a few pages. I guess in some way this blog has become a sort of diary, but today I thought of the few journals I kept on a few of our later trips to Europe. I should get them out and see if there is anything there that might inspire a post or two. Be warned!

And speaking of memories:

YEARS GONE BY

April 27

2024 - Old-fashioned magic - possets - a magical coincidence

2023 - Beginnings

2022 - Nothing

2021 - A winery lunch

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Lucky dip - the pestle and mortar (or mortar and pestle)

2018 - Wine and fruit fusions - I'm too old apparently

2017 - To dine inside, outside or in a restaurant - quelle problème