I've been spending a fair bit of time thinking about foods that are under-used, ignored, or simply have fallen out of favour. An excellent example of this is Fat : an appreciation of a misunderstood ingredient with recipes by Jennifer McLagan, a book that attempts to single-handedly restore one of the most irrationally hated substances in cooking to its rightful place. Another is Bones: recipes, history and lore, coincidentally also by Jennifer McLagan.
Bones, fat, and offal interest me because historically we've eaten all of them, yet currently we eat almost none of them. There are many vegetables that have suffered the same fate; like the pumpkin. Between mid-October and New Years, we eat a few pumpkin pies (usually commercially made, or made with commercial filling), but the majority of pumpkins are cut into jack o'lanterns and discarded a day or two later.
So I ended up with a massive pumpkin back in early November. Maybe no Atlantic Giant, but it was a good 18 kilos or so. When reading Annie Hill's book Voyaging on a Small Income, I learned that squash can be stored for extended periods with not much more than a quick wipe-down with a 5% bleach solution. The bleach impairs the growth of fungus and other microorganisms that degrade the shell of a squash, and once that's accomplished, squash slowly desiccate, but will last a long time without spoiling.
A few weeks after rescuing this pumpkin, I noticed a little bit of white mold starting to grow on some of the rind scars, so I wiped it down and let it sit on a counter in the kitchen for the last eight weeks or so while I figured out what to do with it. It didn't really matter what I cooked it into, this was a big squash and was going to require a lot of preservation after that first cut. Yesterday I decided to get on with the job and picked up the pumpkin for the first time in months.
And it was a good thing I did; I hadn't managed to stop all spoilage on the squash. Around the stem, the pumpkin rind had begun to soften and rot, but the pumpkin itself was in remarkably good shape.
