Pump My Pie

So far on this blog the Pumpkin Recipes I've shared have all been for savoury dishes. However I had long been aware of the American Thanksgiving night dish Pumpkin Pie, which is a sweet dish. 

I have only ever been to a thanksgiving meal once. It was nearly twenty years ago, when I was a university student living in dilapidated halls of residence in a city with connections to Ancient Rome. An American exchange student was over in our halls for the semester and to make her feel at home we decided one evening to make her a thanksgiving meal using our primitive ovens and low-budget ingredients. Pumpkin Pie was on the menu as well as the traditional turkey. It was a night darker than a glass of porter and the radiators were colder than slabs in a morgue, we tucked into that meal as overawed teenagers fresh away from home for the first time. It was a cold night but there was communal warmth between us all.  Basic living conditions they may have been but at least we were students with freedom. 

Back in the present I continued to follow Chris Rea's eleven disc adventure through the history of the blues as cooking commenced on this unique sweet treat.

The ingredients for this recipe are as follows:

300 grams of Sweet Shortcrust Pastry made using Unsalted Butter, Self-Raising Flour, Demerara Sugar and All Spice.

800 grams of Pumpkin Flesh cut into cubes.

• 75 grams of Demerara Sugar.
• A teaspoon of Nutmeg.

A teaspoon of Cinnamon

• 2 beaten Eggs.
• 25 grams of melted Unsalted Butter. 
• 9 tablespoons of Almond Milk. 
• A hint of Vanilla Essence

This recipe is made like this:

1. Boil the Pumpkin Flesh for around twenty minutes. Drain it through a sieve and then purify it in a blender. 

2. Mix the Sugar, Eggs, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Unsalted Butter, Almond Milk and Vanilla Essence in a bowl.

3. Roll out the Pastry and use it to line a greased pie tin around twenty-five centimetres wide and five centimetres deep. 

4. Cook the Pastry in an oven on Gas Mark Four for around fifteen minutes. This method is called "baking it blind".

5, Take the Pastry out of the oven and add all the remaining ingredients from the mixing bowl to the pie tin containing the blind baked pastry. 

6. Cook the pie on Gas Mark Four for around fifty minutes. Leave to cool once cooked prior to serving. 

This meal was something else. While my initial instincts told me a savoury vegetable in a sweet dish could not be right I was proven wrong by the spicy yet sweet flavours of this uniquely wonderful American Dish. Perhaps cooking this meal will now become my family's own thanksgiving night tradition.