Week Thirty-Two: Vegetable

I’m not much of a vegetable person, at least not in the classic sense. I love pulses and legumes and they form the core of my diet, but a vegetable you might think of as in ‘meat and two veg’ (in the food sense not the euphemistic sense) not so much. So thinking of what to do for vegetable week was difficult. I settled on pumpkin for two reasons: one, it’s one of the less objectionable vegetables to me and two, although the mini heatwave where I am right now doesn’t let on, we are fast heading towards autumn/fall. I once remarked that a particular ice cream wasn’t a summer ice cream, and my friend said, “It’s ice cream, all ice creams are summer ice creams, summer is their prime time!” I disagree, some flavours are almost warming and as we look towards the end of summer on the horizon I wanted to start getting some seasonal flavours in mind. Pumpkin could form a base for that, if it’s any good.

Pumpkins have an interesting history. They’re a new world vegetable, amongst the earliest ones to be domesticated with the first evidence of them from Mexico between 7000 and 5500 BCE. The indigenous people of North and Central America used a companion planting system known as the Three Sisters that included squash (pumpkins are in this group), beans and maize/corn - the maize grew tall and so provided a support for the beans, the beans put nitrogen into the soil and the squash shielded the ground. (Maize is also fascinating: all evidence suggests it was domesticated from something called teosinte that looks like it will never produce a foodstuff. Maize is entirely dependent on humans, it doesn’t seed itself and so would die within a generation if humans stopped farming it, so maize being the product of natural evolution seems unlikely unless the human dependency was one of the last ‘steps’ - evolution isn’t really a set of steps, but I won’t go on that rant here - and yet it also seems unlikely to think of a Mexican farmer in about 10000 BCE looking at teosinte and thinking it was worth the effort to selectively breed it. But I digress.) European settlers got a hold of pumpkins not long after arrival in the Americas, and within decades the pumpkin variant Connecticut field pumpkin was established. These are the sorts of pumpkins you see at Hallowe’en, which makes it an unusual example of an heirloom or heritage plant still being widely grown; I won’t reveal all yet, but for now trust me when I say heritage plants aren’t easy to find sometimes.

Pumpkin ice cream

It’s not really a new recipe this week; this is basically the fruit recipe but with pumpkin replacing the fruit. I used a tin of pumpkin but I’m looking forward to pumpkins being in season to try it with fresh pumpkin. 

This took me by surprise. Maybe I’m just inexperienced with pumpkin as a flavour, but I don’t think I’d ever recognise this as pumpkin. It tastes almost like an earthy version of malt and works really well as an ice cream. I’m excited for autumn, even more than I already was.