Grandma's Pumpkin Bread

Grandma’s kitchen is a sepia-toned memory of Hoosier cabinets and a glass double boiler, of apple pies fresh out of the oven and fudge cooling in the pan, of the clatter of pint jars and the trill of birdsong through an open window. Grandma's kitchen is spacious and sunlit, with the original oaken cabinets of the depression era affixed with glass knobs and hung with tea towels hand-embroidered in the motif of her choice. Grandma’s kitchen is spotlessly clean but welcoming, with a vast porcelain sink, a dish cloth and a metal pad she refers to as a chore boy, a straw broom and a dustpan standing sentinel in the corner. Grandma’s Kitchen is rich with the blooming smells of roasting turkey, simmering jam, cakes baking, percolating coffee. Grandma’s kitchen is truly the hub of the home, where good food, the making of it and the sharing of it and the sharing of the making of it, meet to make meltingly lovely memories. During this month of remembrance, I devote a column to each of the powerful matriarchal figures from my life, as I honor the profound effect each of these women had on me by recalling their very different kitchens, and by sharing a blue ribbon recipe that was the signature of each kitchen and the woman who inhabited it.

My reverence for grandmothers started on a homestead in a small town on the Arkansas-Oklahoma border. My grandmother's home was a farm house of the kind anyone who grew up in that time and place would recognize. The house was painted cream with mint green trim. Four steps led to a front porch hewn from a single pour of concrete -- to this day, wet cement is my favorite smell. On the front porch, metal chairs were grouped for visiting around metal stands of ivy. And visitors there were – emissaries from church and garden club, relations who were “just in the neighborhood,” members of the community dropping off eggs or bolts of cloth because they “had extry” and picking up seedlings or loaves of bread using the same excuse.

Living was communal, and that was true not just in the macro of the community but in the micro of the homestead. Plants were members of the household just as surely as the rest of us were. Puffs of hydrangeas and azaleas bloomed in pure white around the porch. Every side of the home was alive with vegetation -- snowballs in the gulley below the swing, raspberry and blackberry briars under the bedroom windows, strawberries within reach of the parlor windows. On the lawn, a black walnut tree discharged those wicked husks, in a humid perfume that my grandmother loved but to me just smelled like decaying leaves. A paw paw tree grew gargantuan up the side of the wellhouse where my pet bat Bela lived.

In the style of the day, my grandmother maintained formal rooms and informal ones. A pristine front parlor and guest bedroom were only for visitors. The dining room, also formal, only saw action at a luncheon, on holidays, and for Sunday supper. That level of formality did not make it as far as the kitchen, which aside from some modern appointments was basically the same as it had been since the Depression. The counters were laid with gold-flecked cream tile set with milky green accents. Everything from the canisters on the countertop to the everyday dishes in the cupboard carried that scheme. Right by the stove, which upon assuming residency in 1929 had been a cast-iron “Lucifer” but had long since been replaced with a modern appliance, cavernous bins pulled out of the wall on rollers. These had originally stored onions and potatoes, but my grandmother used them to store canning equipment and a huge manual meat grinder that, to a child, felt as heavy to lift as a grand piano. My grandmother hoisted that grinder onto the edge of the work table as if it weighed nothing and anchored it there with rubber-coated clamps. It was telling that she didn’t just leave it in place, but remember that for all of their capacity and organization of those Depression era prairie kitchens and the well-ordered chaos when kitchen work was occurring, the goal of those cooks was to transmit that all of that work was really no work at all.

Most of grandma’s kitchen work was more affable than grinding meat or putting grandkids through the rigors of a farm-level canning and preserving assembly line. As I’ve written before, much of her food was the platinum standard by which I judge any such dish today. She made the best roasted turkey I’ve ever tasted, as well as the best apple pie and the best chow-chow. Unfortunately, I didn’t inherit those recipes (though I’ve approximated each, successfully I’m told), but one kitchen item for which she was renowned, and for which I do have the “receipt,” was her pumpkin bread.

As all kitchen gardeners did and many still do, she grew squash, including yellow squash and zucchini to requisite excess. I don’t know why she didn’t grow pumpkins; it could have been as simple as not being in the best zone for winter squash. It couldn’t have been the heft of harvesting them (witness the cast iron meat grinder) and it couldn’t have been the effort of cooking with them (she thought nothing of tangling with those devilish black walnuts). Maybe it was just that other people, including professional canneries, could do it better. But while she didn’t grow pumpkins, she loved cooking with them, and she was known far and wide for her pumpkin bread.

As befit a Depression era homesteader, she despised waste. She thought carefully before throwing anything away. In those early days, homesteaders who didn’t have fancy baking equipment didn’t need it, because they could and did repurpose. One of the common practices of the day was to bake bread in old coffee tins, and that was how my grandmother baked her pumpkin bread. Those neighbors who trailed into and out of the homestead all day long? There was a big plastic tub on the back porch where they dropped off their used coffee cans, knowing that when autumn came around, one or two of those cans would come back to them as a reward, containing my grandmother’s blue ribbon pumpkin bread.

The pumpkin bread below is not baked in a coffee can, but it is a good loaf nonetheless. Anyone expecting the indifferent slab of sugar and spice of countless coffeehouse counters is in for a shock, for this is true old-fashioned quick bread, dark and heavy, very fragrant, and not particularly sweet. In that way it reflects my grandmother’s Osage heritage, for it is reminiscent of fry bread. Bake this bread in a regular loaf pan for a family treat, for a community coffee hour, for a bake sale. Once people have had a taste, it will either evoke memories long buried or form new ones. Either way, you may become as famous for this pumpkin bread as my grandmother was. Just remember to acknowledge those prairie cooks of long ago for the recipe, so that those ghosts of the Depression kitchen didn't struggle, and triumph, in vain.

Grandma’s Pumpkin Bread

1-1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus extra for the pan
2 eggs
1-1/2 cups canned pumpkin
2/3 cup molasses
¼ cup whole milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, plus extra for the top
1 teaspoon ground ginger1
teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
½ cup chopped black walnuts
1 tablespoon dark brown sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Butter a 9 x 5 loaf pan.
3. Measure the flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a mixing bowl. Use a whisk to stir the dry ingredients together.
4. Measure the pumpkin into a mixing bowl. Measure the cinnamon, ginger, cloves, allspice and nutmeg into the pumpkin. Use the whisk to mix the spices into the pumpkin.
5. Measure the brown sugar into a bowl. Add ½ tablespoon water to the bowl. Use a small spatula to mix the sugar and water together to form a paste. Add the black walnuts to the bowl containing the brown sugar paste. Use the spatula to coat the walnuts with the sugar paste.
6. Melt the butter in the microwave or in a small pan over low heat. Set the melted butter aside to cool.
7. Break the eggs into a large mixing bowl. Use a whisk to stir the eggs until they are thick and golden. Measure the vanilla into the eggs; whisk to incorporate. Measure the milk into the vanilla-egg mixture; whisk to incorporate.
8. Measure the molasses into the bowl containing the spiced pumpkin. Use the whisk to incorporate the molasses and the spiced pumpkin together. Once the butter has cooled, gently whisk the melted butter into the molasses-pumpkin mixture. Whisk constantly but gently. The mixture should be thick, fragrant and silky, with no clumps.
9. Starting with the dry ingredients, alternate adding the dry ingredients and the egg-milk mixture to the pumpkin-molasses mixture. Use the whisk to stir just until combined with each addition. Use half of each mixture each time until you have used all of both the dry ingredients and the egg-milk mixture.
10. Use a spatula to fold the batter into the loaf pan.
11. Sprinkle the top of the bread with the sugared walnuts.
12. Transfer the pan to the oven. Bake the bread 50 minutes.
13. Once 50 minutes have passed, test the bread for doneness by sticking a toothpick in the center of the bread and then quickly removing the toothpick. The toothpick should come out clean, with no wet batter. If warranted, bake the bread another 5 to 10 minutes.
14. Remove the baked bread from the oven. Allow to cool before serving.