Pumpkins
As the days draw in and temperatures drop, our minds turn to pumpkins. It wouldn’t be October without great orange orbs adorning our porches and flavoring everything we eat and drink from coffee to pie. It’s impossible not to notice these bright round pumpkins spilling down stoops.
I’d never seen a real pumpkin before arriving in Queens. Australia never had pumpkins. They have winter squash with skin ranging from greyish white to dark green, and butternut squash. They call these all pumpkins, but they’re not.
How lucky we are in Queens to have seasons? In Melbourne, where I’ve spent most of my adult life, seasons blend seamlessly into one another. True, July is generally cold and February is hot, but it’s not unusual to experience all three seasons in one day. Most of Australia only has three seasons. Proper winter never comes; snow never falls, and the ground doesn’t freeze.
All this makes the seasons here, which drop with the changing phases of the sun like curtains falling between the acts of a play, so much more special. I love the nip in the air, I love the dark nights, the pumpkins, and the scary monsters who will soon knock at my door. Even better, I’ve come to love pumpkin soup, pumpkin beer, pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin pies, and more.
In Australia pumpkins are available year around. October is spring not fall, making the pumpkin’s special connection with harvest, unknown. Down under, harvest is ongoing and winter the principal growing season. Besides, if we Aussie’s did have pumpkins, we’d eat the flesh boiled, or streamed, then mashed with a little salt, pepper and butter, or roasted in the pan next to a gigantic slab of lamb, beef, or pork.
Most Australian’s know that there is a dish called pumpkin pie. We know that it’s a sweet dessert. We know that it is beloved by Americans, but we can’t imagine why. Just the thought of a pumpkin flavored sweet dish prompts an ew!
There is only one exception to this Aussie pumpkin convention. In the 1980s, Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen, the wife of an eccentric Australian politician, became famous for her pumpkin scones. We thought it was the funniest thing we’d ever heard of. Australian scones are usually made with a slightly sweet dough and cooked in a thick cookie sized round. Served straight from the oven, they are broken open, topped with jam and cream, and served as afternoon tea. The idea of scones made with pumpkin seemed so ridiculous, we could not be bribed to try them. But that didn’t stop Lady Flo serving her pumpkin scones.
Had I never come to live in Queens, I may never have known how delicious sweet pumpkin scones are.
