Heirloom Thanksgiving: My Mother’s Pumpkin Pie

Some of my food memories are so vivid: the scent of my grandmother’s potato pancakes cooking, the bratwurst my grandfather would saute with mustard and serve with breakfast, the meatball stroganoff that was my brother’s favorite dinner and the crunchy baked chicken that was mine. I did love all those foods, but I make them these days for the memories they stir up, and in order to feel a little closer to home.

If I had to pick one iconic recipe of my childhood, it would be this pie. My father always requested this pie for his birthday (my family isn’t all that into cake). We’d usually have it for Thanksgiving too, and carve off  slivers for days afterward. The texture improves and flavors deepen after a day or two in the fridge, which makes it the perfect dessert for those of us who like to start cooking for Thanksgiving a few days ahead.

This pie is dark with molasses and cloves, deeply spicy and smooth. I make it at least once every fall, sometimes for Matt’s birthday and otherwise just for me, a connection to home during a holiday I haven’t celebrated at my parents’ table out west for nine years now.

I called my mom to ask for a little more background on the recipe, and it turns out that she found it in a little cookbook assembled by the Cleveland Council on World Affairs in 1964. It was called  A Taste of the World, and it also included a recipe from a family friend of ours, Hope. Hope gave my mother the sweet little cookbook at my mother’s bridal shower in 1970, and this pie (along with Hope’s sesame chicken) has been a family favorite ever since. The cookbook is a bit of an old-fashioned affair—all I know about the contributor of this recipe is her husband’s name.

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Addendum: a friend was kind enough to dig this up…a little info on Mrs. Demmy here—there’s even a Portland connection!

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Sweet Potato Purée with Pecan Streusel: A Little Something On the Side

As you might have gathered, we’re big fans of Thanksgiving here at P&C. Last year, Shiv even live-blogged her fabulous Thanksgiving fête. While I’ve helped put on a huge Fakesgiving celebration a few times before and after the actual holiday, I hadn’t cooked a full Thanksgiving menu by myself until recently. Luckily, I received a review copy of Diane Morgan’s  The New Thanksgiving Table, so I had a good source for inspiration.

Many of the recipes in this book aren’t really limited to Thanksgiving. I’m sure your guests at any dinner party wouldn’t mind being served Vermont farmhouse cheddar cheese straws or crostini with gulf shrimp, jalapeno and lime, and a parsnip-potato soup topped with crispy bacon would make a delicious meal for any time.

If you’re feeling Thanksgiving ennui and looking for something new, this is also the place for updated classics. There’s turkey glazed with maple syrup, and instructions for spatchcocked turkey roasted with lemon. There’s a riff on stuffing with Linguiça sausage and a sweet potato dish basted with chipotle and lime.

I cooked up Morgan’s sweet potato purée topped with a sweet pecan streusel. I tweaked the quantities slightly, reducing the butter a bit and cutting down the brown sugar—my sweet potatoes were pretty sweet to begin with.

Roasting the sweet potatoes concentrates their flavor nicely, but an equivalent amount of canned unsweetened sweet potato purée is not a huge compromise in this recipe. Just check the ingredients on the can first, or you might hit sugar overload before you even get to the pie.

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Stuffing from 1975: Still Delicious

I made this stuffing last night and just had to share. It’s possibly my favorite stuffing ever, due to the addition of cornbread with sage baked into it. Brilliant.

Apples, mushrooms, and a secret ingredient make it all the more tasty. Check out the recipe (and more) over at Gourmet, Unbound.

If you have a food blog, we’d love if you’d join us in our celebration of the now-defunct magazine. Each month, we’ll host a roundup of blog posts that feature recipes from any year’s Gourmet issues from that month. I’m so excited to see what everyone cooks!

Apples from the Moon: Quince-Apple Pie

I am probably not the only one who looked at the September 2009 cover of Gourmet and thought, what IS that? An apple from the moon?

That strange fuzzy green fruit was a quince, of course, and as soon as my farmer’s market had some I scooped them up. I have to say, even if you don’t plan on making this pie, buying a few quinces is a good idea just for the scent. Sitting in a bowl in your kitchen, they give off a sweet perfume for days.

In the oven, they’re even better. This pie is a bit of a business, since quince are too tough to just throw into a pie filling. Roasting the sliced quince in a bit of orange juice softens them enough to toss with slivered apples and pile high into a pie crust.

Their taste is a little musky, a little floral, and not quite as sweet as they smell. It makes for a grown-up pie with slightly rosy, spicy filling. If you’re plotting out pies for Thanksgiving, I’d suggest roasting the quince a day ahead and storing in an airtight container in the roasting liquid overnight. With the help of a big food processor, you can whip up several pie crusts the day before as well and store in your fridge until you’re ready to roll them out.

Happy November, everyone!

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Thanksgiving Secrets and Leftover Treasures

Clearly Shiv’s been busy. I have to admit, I’m a little jealous of that feast—mint julep pie???

The thing is, I’m also jealous of the leftovers. We could have tupperwared some up from our Virginia celebration, but the long car/train ride wouldn’t have been great in terms of food safety. I’m sure plenty of you are in the same position—what if you need leftovers and don’t have any?

The answer is to roast up a couple of turkey legs (cheaply available post-holiday). I cooked four of them for about twenty minutes at 450 and 45 minutes at 400 after rubbing them with a little mustard, olive oil, and thyme. Why? My cravings for leftover turkey are threefold:

First, the meat will be perfect in an old-school casserole I’ll make tomorrow: bechamel, broccoli, pasta, cheese, and turkey meld beautifully and some breadcrumbs will brown on top. My mom used to make a similar one with leftover chicken, but turkey’s even better.

Second, the bones! If you still have a turkey carcass in your fridge, or you roast up some pieces like I did, please consider turkey stock. More flavorful than chicken broth, with a deep richness, turkey broth is the cold-battler of choice at our place. Matt grew up with it, and chicken broth just won’t do when he has that pitiful nose-red-from-kleenexes look going. Tonight I’m trying the slow-cooker method (carrots, onions, roasted bones with a bit of the meat, and necks in the slow cooker with enough water to come within an inch of the top of the container. I’m cooking it for a few hours on high then switching to low for a total of 12 hours.) I particularly love turkey broth as a base for a greens-and-white-beans soup.

Finally, the secret, which I promised you back when we were talking about brisket.

My future mother-in-law’s secret to easy Thanksgivings (and other turkey-based entertaining) is to always be one gravy ahead. The gravy from the previous turkey is frozen and rewarmed for the current meal. There is no last-minute gravy-making as you juggle side dishes and pies, carving and tablesetting, bread slicing and salad-making. You already have the gravy. Then, you make the next gravy later, while someone else is doing the dishes, or the next day, if you chucked the whole roasting pan and turkey carcass in the fridge to deal with later. Make your soup, make your gravy, freeze it, and then you’ll never be harried on Thanksgiving again.

Of course, to get one gravy ahead, you either have to make volumes of gravy at some point and have leftovers, or create your own leftovers (as I did tonight) and make a gravy to save.

Consider it a gift to your future self.