The NYT Dining section includes a feature called "Front Burner," which describes a variety of foodie items available for purchase. I always skim it slowly, because I can only glance at the paragraphs in between eye rolls. Sometimes the eye rolls are about the expense of the food for sale. I mean, seriously, why would I pay $60 for a cheesecake? Why would I do that? Sometimes the eye rolls are about the preposterousness of the food for sale. If I wanted to make inedible ice cream, I could add my own dill pickles. I don't need to order miso/black truffle sorbet with exorbitant shipping. But today, my friends, my eyes gleamed rather than rolling. Today Florence Fabricant is writing about pumpkin preserves.
The Anne Shirley fans among you have probably skipped away, eyes also agleam, in search of the article. In Anne of Windy Poplars, our heroine discovers pumpkin preserves. They are the most delicious food she has ever consumed. Eating pumpkin preserves is like eating sunshine, she writes to Gilbert.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite things about reading books from long ago was the food descriptions. I was a very picky kid, so it wasn't necessarily that I wanted to eat the foods described. But I liked thinking about them. Watermelon rind preserves! Who knew such a thing existed? Rye 'n' Injun bread-- what could that even be? --wondered the girl who subsisted chiefly on a bland and puffy brand of white bread known to late 70s New Orleans shoppers as Bunny Bread. (My school toured the factory when I was in second or third grade, and I was a loyal customer until we moved away.)
The very idea of pumpkin preserves struck me as implausible. How could you turn...a pumpkin...into something like jam? And how could it be delicious? And what was this world in which people ate jam-like things with a fork, at dinnertime? And yet I knew Anne Shirley would never lie to me.
In today's NYT there is a little blurb about pumpkin preserves, a new product available from Murray's Cheese Shop. When we went to NYC last summer my husband was especially pleased to visit Murray's. Cheese is one of his favorite indulgences, the smellier the better. If I suggest to him that we should place an order from Murray's he will almost certainly say YES YES OF COURSE!
In Windy Poplars the pumpkin preserves episode has an unfortunate ending: so many people feed Anne pumpkin preserves that it begins to taste like death march rather than sunshine.
But we could probably avoid that if we served it out by careful (and occasional) spoonfuls. How often does a person have the opportunity to eat the food of her imagined childhood? What are the odds that it will indeed taste like sunshine?
(Maybe don't answer that last question.)
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