When Autumn leaves turn to red and gold, I am transported down Memory Lane to my Indiana childhood and pumpkin time.
Father always had a big pumpkin patch. He grew huge "Pie Pumpkins", which are different from the decorative or jack-o-lantern pumpkins, being thicker and much meatier. They had large seeds which we saved for toasting - a winter treat for us kids. I remember that when Dad harvested his pumpkins, people came from the neighborhood and the town to buy them from him; some for children's jack-o-lanterns, because young women no longer cooked down pumpkin for pies, prefering the easier lazy option of buying a can of pumphin from the store.
Dad once had a pumpkin that weighed over 300 pounds. This monster won him first prize in the county's "Biggest Pumpkin Contest". Such gargantuan pumpkins look impressive but are useless for the kitchen. They are too big to render into pie pumpkin to can or freeze. Mother picked out smaller pie pumpkins for us, and like every country woman had her own particular method for cooking down pumpkin for pies.
I helped Mother do this several times. First we made a cut like the lid of a jack-o-lantern, because it is easier to make the big long cuts down the sides if you start out with a hole in the top. We took out the pith, saving all the seeds for toasting and for sowing for next year's crop. No one wasted anything in a Quaker household. Next we cut the pumpkin into long curved vertical strips about 2 - 3 inches wide which we then cut into little chunks 2-3 inches long before peeling the tough outer skin off.
Mother put all the prepared chunks into a huge pot with the warning "Use very little water!" Enough was used to start them steaming, and slowly cooking....we stirred the pot every few minutes to get the top chunks to the heat in the bottom, constantly turning that pumpkin over and replacing the lid to steam it.
Once we had the steaming going we could stir at longer intervals and just let it cook down, watching the amount of water at the beginning so that it just covered the bottom of the pot by half an inch or less and stirring to ensure that the pumpkin meat didn't scorch or blacken. The thing you didn't want was watery or blackened pumpkin after all that work!
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