University Eats

Ah, the pumpkin. Our Halloween season just wouldn’t be the same without this strange orange squash. During early October, its smell, taste and likeness start to show up in everything from hand soaps to seasonal beers, and by early November everyone has one rotting its buck-toothed grin all over the front porch.

As far as I’m concerned, all of this attention on the pumpkin is well deserved. It’s a versatile vegetable, amenable to being steamed, fried, baked or pureed. You can even boil the leaves or bake the seeds, if you’re one of those people who is really into using all the parts of the plant. Pumpkin is also full of vitamin A, like other orange vegetables, making it pretty healthy and delicious at the same time.

I might think pumpkin is great now, but I didn’t always like it. In fact, my first encounter with pumpkin as a food and not as a candle-lit holiday decoration came when I was six, and the end result was a lot of vomiting.

My parents and I were visiting my grandparents’ house in Connecticut – the last visit before they sold that place and moved to Florida like every other pair of old people in America. At dinner, my grandmother proudly ladled out the pumpkin soup she’d fixed as an appetizer, but my six-year-old nose wrinkled in disgust at the smell and appearance of the yellowy-brown slop placed before me. My stomach expressed its disgust as well a short time later when I threw up the few slurps my parents had forced me to take.

A short lesson for parents: Encourage your children to be adventurous eaters. Do not, however, force them to eat something that even you agree looks like it’s actually on the other end of its trip through the body.

It’s too bad that my first conscious encounter with pumpkin had to be with that soup and not my other grandmother’s delicious pies, the subdued sweetness of which eventually helped my childhood self realize pumpkin was safe to put in my mouth.

Since my youthful experiences with pumpkin I’ve tried it in a few different ways, though nothing really has matched up to my grandmothers’ dishes – on the good or bad end of the taste spectrum. I’ve even made soup, and it hasn’t made me come close to retching.