The table has returned
All through this week while I have been hit & miss with the internet, hit & miss with opening the right cardboard box and hit & miss with the idea of pizza-dough-from-scratch, I have been composing this message to North America. Or those of you who live in North America, I should say. I’m sure the dirt of the continent itself cares very little.
The message was this: be extra thankful for pumpkin pie.
I know, I know, it’s just one of those things. You have it at Thanksgiving. You might have it at Christmas too. You might even order it at the airport Denny’s in early November because there’s no cherry pie on the menu and you’re too far from here to get pie and make your flight. But by and large, pumpkin pie is just there. And I think for the two decades I spent living in North America, I just took it for granted. Even if you thought someone else was making the pie and found out at the last minute that there was no pie on its way, you could whip up a pumpkin pie in no time, between tins of pre-packed pumpkin pie filling and premade pie crusts already in those tin pie dishes.
Pumpkin pie was just so easy that everyone started branching out. Pumpkin cake. Pumpkin cheesecake. Pumpkin cheesecake ice cream. But here’s how I really knew someone was taking pumpkin pie for granted: I walked into a grocery store in the states on the morning of November first. There was a sign on a giant display of pumpkins: Halloween is over—free pumpkins. Really? Really, after trick or treating, the pumpkins had no intrinsic value?
You won’t really find pumpkin pie on menus over here. We don’t have Thanksgiving and our Christmas traditions involve things like mince pies, Christmas cake and Christmas pudding, which yes, all have some similarities. But no pumpkin. You’ll find pumpkin as an ingredient in main dishes like pumpkin-filled pasta and starters like pumpkin soup, but not for dessert. So when I said I was bringing pumpkin pie for dessert at a bonfire night party last year, I was met with some trepidation. It didn’t sound like a dessert, I guess. Remember, this is a land where pie is more synonymous with dinner itself: shepherd’s pie (which Scotland, Ireland and Northen England all claim to have invented!), steak & kidney pie (which as a vegetarian just sounds…not nice?) ...but after eating pumpkin pie, they were won over, and now everyone alerts me if they see pumpkins appearing in the shops so I can grab a few to roast and turn into pie. {And maybe a few cupcakes too, I’ll admit.}
We started moving in on Friday and had pretty much everything moved in (but not unpacked) by Sunday lunch time. So we headed to the Sunday afternoon farmer’s market in our new neighbourhood and found adorable pumpkins for a pound, just the right size to make two pies: one for us and one as a thank you for the boy’s parents who helped us move. And we ate ours off cardboard boxes, since we hadn’t quite unearthed the dining table yet. And that moment when you realise you are all moved in and you’ve unpacked enough stuff to be able to use your kitchen to bake pie? You realise that you should never take pumpkin pie for granted ever again.
Of course…the next day I ran into some irony. Turns out we have a little local food shop with a huge proportion of imported goods. Including tinned pumpkin. And yes, I bought some to put on the shelf just in case. So maybe this whole message I had imagined in my head wasn’t really all that important after all.
xlovesx
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