Professor Produce

Is it worth making pumpkin pie from real pumpkins? What kind of pumpkin should a person use for desserts like that?

Absolutely. Not because it will taste better, but because I can't think of anything more worthwhile than utilizing and celebrating this most underestimated of vegetables, the winter squash.

The existence of pumpkin pie today would probably make a South American Indian of antiquity's eyes bulge, as originally winter squash was grown solely for its tasty nutritious seeds-the flesh of early curcurbitae varieties was bitter and unpleasant. Much as corn was cultivated from the diligent and continual hybridization of grass (yep, the stuff you mow. I ask you!), squash was carefully bred for thousands of years to produce the sugary sweet and mellow flavor we have come to know and love in a squash today. Perhaps you're thinking, "Oh yes-corn, beans, squash, their marvelous history, blah blah." But really, folks, when we are talking about winter squash, we are talking about survival, the success and evolution of humankind. Tell that to the next person at your table who says, "No thanks, I'm not a fan of squash."

So pumpkins grew to be sweet, and then people decided they liked them even sweeter. Linda Stradley, author of website "What's Cooking America," notes that the earliest recorded pumpkin pie-like recipe, circa 1621, sounded something like this:

Hollow out one pumpkin, fill it with milk, honey, and spices. Replace the pumpkin top, and bake the whole thing in ashes.

It wasn't until pumpkins met the French that something like our pies of today surfaced, recorded in cookbook Le Vrai Cuisinier Francois (The True French Cook) published in1651. Chef Francois Pierre la Varenne wrote this charming bit:

Tourte of pumpkin-Boil it with good milk, pass it through a straining pan very thick, and mix it with sugar, butter, a little salt and if you will, a few stamped almonds; let all be very thin. Put it in your sheet of paste; bake it. After it is baked, besprinkle it with sugar and serve.

Personally, I can't get enough of that. Flash forward three hundred years and Betty Crocker is suggesting you use Crisco and a tin of cooked squash. Times change, priorities change, and even produce changes. For example, if you were to use this old French recipe, and substitute say, six of local Rock Spring Farm's sugar loaf squashes for the pumpkin, you wouldn't even need to besprinkle anything with sugar. Squash has never ceased evolving.

To that end, you may be shocked to realize that an actual carving pumpkin is not necessarily the best choice for making pumpkin pie. Even canned pumpkin is usually made of butternut squash, a fact which, when intimated to some customers, has made jaws drop.

Butternut makes great pie filling because it's sweet, thick and easy to work with. The small, sweet pie pumpkins coming in from Gardens of Eagan or Featherstone Farm will make a great pie with a bit stringier consistency as is more traditional.

Squash has a rich history but remains a somewhat humble, taken for granted vegetable. If you wish to participate in this rich history and make an entirely homemade pie this fall, then it is most decidedly "worth" it, because nothing could better link you to the essence of harvest season-the celebration of humankind's dynamic relationship to the bounty the earth provides.