- @errand: ($) food; also, dark brown sugar, baking soda, cloves, nutmeg, cream sherry ¾ c dark brown sugar 2 c pumpkin puree 2 eggs, beaten ½ c melted butter 4 c white flour ½ c wholemeal flour 2 tsp baking powder 2 tsp baking soda 1 ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp nutmeg ¼ tsp cloves ½ c cream sherry ==== Who has TIME to write blog entries on Christmas Eve??! So I thought I’d give you a recipe instead. I love pumpkin in all its forms but I am a Pumpkin Bread Fiend. Pumpkin bread is one of the things I started making when I was a teenager—and I still have that recipe, given to me either by a high school friend or her mother, my memory is a little vague on this point, but I remember both her and her mother*. Forty years later every time still I open to that page in my notebook and see my adolescent handwriting, a tiny thrill of horror goes through me. My teenage years were not worth living, but at least they’re over, and I did get a good pumpkin bread recipe out of them. But that recipe is only the beginning. One of my minor life quests is for pumpkin bread recipes. I used to semi-collect cookbooks, and when I was cruising bookshop shelves for additions to my own, one of things I checked for in indexes is pumpkin bread. And if there was a recipe, and the recipe looked interesting, chances are I’d buy the book. And then bring it home . . . and fail utterly to follow the recipe because I am more or less constitutionally incapable of following a recipe. But I get lovely new ideas from other people’s recipes. I have gone through phases of roasting my own fresh pumpkin for the seeds and the puree—and back at the old house we actually grew pumpkins—but mostly I’ve been happy to tread the modern urban way and buy jars and tins in a shop. Or I have with relief reverted again to buying the stuff in a shop: dealing with the seeds in particular, in their great fibrous tangle, is a time-eating monster, and even clawing out the flesh and rendering the puree into puree is messy.** I was diverted down that earnest path seventeen years ago again—having gratefully emerged from my Daughter of the Earth phase and was stooping (joyfully) to errors like eating chocolate and drinking black tea with evil white sugar again—because, seventeen years ago, the English appeared not to believe in pumpkins. Indeed seventeen years ago you could barely get seed to grow the beggars, and if you asked for puree in a shop they looked at you as if you’d asked for alligator liver. Of course they already knew about you, because you’d made your request in an American accent. And then it turned out that the English apparently aren’t too crazy about pumpkin even when it is presented to them as a fait accompli, in bread or muffins or cookies or pies, and if they eat it, they tend to eat it dutifully. This is discouraging.*** I’ve given up making pumpkin pies, and the jury’s not in on whether I’ve given up making pumpkin cookies or am just having a little moratorium, but nothing is going to stop me making pumpkin muffins and, particularly, bread. Some of the English have evidently converted to some degree to the mushy orange vegetable† however because you started being able to buy pumpkin puree in the shops a few years ago—although at the organic-and-whole-foods store I buy mine at they tell me that only I and one other American woman ever do buy it. Never mind. It’s available. And I don’t have room for both rhubarb and pumpkins in the garden at the Third House—and rhubarb takes a lot less mucking about when you bring it indoors. I’m not burning with desire to engage with raw pumpkins again. So I can relax on the procurement front †† —there’s usually a big fat jar of pumpkin puree in the cottage cupboard for the moment the frenzy strikes—and concentrate on recipes. Lately however, what with menopause††† and all, I’ve had to turn away from recipes loaded with butter, sugar, maple syrup, chocolate‡, etc, and look toward something with pumpkin and one or two socially redeeming values—but not too many. And so I give you the Christmas 2008 Pumpkin Bread recipe: ¾ c dark brown sugar 2 c pumpkin puree 2 eggs, beaten ½ c melted butter 4 c white flour ½ c wholemeal flour 2 tsp baking powder 2 tsp baking soda 1 ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp nutmeg ¼ tsp cloves ½ c cream sherry Mix all the wet stuff except the sherry together and beat smooth; then mix all the dry stuff together and add it to the wet stuff. Last beat in the sherry. Do it thoroughly but no more than that; quick breads are like muffins, you whip ’em together and get ’em in the oven while the baking powder and soda are still exploding. Pour into two buttered‡‡ 8” loaf tins and bake 350 F about forty-five minutes till the toothpick comes out clean, etc. The idea of cream sherry (port works too) is out of a recipe from The Art of Quick Breads, Beth Hensperger (Chronicle Books, 1994), but this is a drastically evolved recipe and the rest is not at all like, given the presence of pumpkin in both. And I use spelt flour rather than ordinary wheat because it’s easier to digest—even for those of you with calm, efficient guts this is perhaps something to think about during the holidays. May you be dripping crumbs all over your keyboard as you read this. . . . * And the fact that the first time I ever ate venison was at her house. This was in Maine, and her father was one of those who went out every year to bag a deer for the freezer. It was amazingly tough (I was accustomed to supermarket meat) and amazingly tasty ( . . . the same remark applies). ** Not to mention the whole freezer-space issue and my truly lunatic habit of feeling that once something is in the freezer it wants to stay there for that Holy Perfect Moment some unimaginable time in the future. What Holy Perfect Moment? I will look longingly at applesauce cake recipes, for example, with a whole drawer in the freezer^ full of last autumn’s applesauce—which is about the only harvest laying-by I do any more^^—and it takes huge moral effort to defrost any and use it. ^ Granted we’re talking tiny freezer and tinier drawer. Even so. ^^ Supposing my rhubarb ever gets going, I will also freeze rhubarb. It and the applesauce can keep each other company. *** It also makes me wonder if maybe there’s a national character after all. Americans like pumpkin. It’s in the genome. † And then there’s been the struggle over butternut squash, and various other squishy orange lovelies †† At least till it goes back out of fashion again ††† )=(*&^%+$:>?@##£”!!!!!!!!!! ‡ I used to make a glorious chocolate chip pumpkin cake ‡‡ Yes butter. Butter in the recipe and butter to grease the pans. It’s actually better for you than most of the alternatives and it works better. Pass it on. [ from http://robinmckinley.livejournal.com/34779.html ]