Last week's rain brought a gift! When I took my walk the next morning in crisp air and under a deep blue sky, I noticed lots of wild persimmons on the ground. I’d noticed there was a persimmon tree along my route, but they kept appearing across my path in twos or threes, not in the quantity I needed for cooking – until the storms. Rafts of pine needles and yellowed leaves were all over the roads and the small, squat orange persimmons dotted the grass. Some were squashed, but many were whole. I fought the yellow jackets and ants for the good ones, heading home with the front of my tee shirt bulging.
It had been years since I ate my last wild persimmon. The house where I grew up had a tree in one corner of the yard and my mom used to make cookies with them around Halloween. The smell of the fruit alone brought me sharply back to days gone by.
I gathered 1.8 pounds (815g) of ripe persimmons, which I washed and pressed through a wire mesh sieve to get about 1½ cups (380g) of thick pulp. Isn't it a lovely autumn color? The pulp isn't very sticky, yet somehow I somehow managed to get it on all the doorknobs in the house as I moved around taking photos, composting the discards, planting seeds to sprout my own persimmon tree, and hosing off the sieve in the back yard. Oops.
The discards – skins, seeds, and stringy part of the pulp – is actually lovely with autumn colors. The light coming through it in the sieve looked like a stained glass window.
Even the caps are pretty. They are woody and durable, so I rinsed and air dried them in the hopes that I can string them or make autumn nature art with Eli.
I put some pulp in the fridge and made Mom's cookies with it a couple of days later. They were fantastic -- moist little mounds with that distinctive persimmon flavor.
Sigh. I forgot to take a photo of the finished cookies, but I don't feel right posting the recipe anyway. I saw on Mom's recipe card that she got it from Southern Living magazine in 1971, which might make me run amok of copyright issues. I checked the web to see if Southern Living posted the recipe, but they haven't. If any of my friends want it, you can email me!
I froze the extra half cup of pulp. Then I gathered a few more persimmons over the last week to bring it up to a full cup. I can tell, though, that I'm at the end of the harvest for this year. Alas, what to do! I was dying to try my hand at making Persimmon Pudding but didn't have enough. I decided to wing it using an amalgam of a good half-dozen recipes plus I had some canned pumpkin that I keep in ice cube trays in the freezer to add to Eli's oatmeal. I thawed a half cup's worth and this morning plunged into a culinary adventure...
Persimmon Pumpkin Pudding
Ingredients:
1 cup (260 g) wild persimmon pulp
½ cup (130 g) pumpkin (or just use 1 ½ cups persimmon)
¼ cup (2 ounces) melted butter
½ cup buttermilk (or 2 teaspoons vinegar in ½ cup milk)
1 cup (230 g) granulated sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 ¼ cups (150 g) all purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground ginger
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees and move oven rack to middle setting.
- Butter and flour a 9-inch ceramic pie dish or a 9 x 9 inch baking pan.
- Combine wet ingredients in a large mixing bowl – persimmon pulp, pumpkin, butter, buttermilk, and eggs. Add sugar and stir well with a whisk.
- In a separate small bowl, mix dry ingredients together – flour, soda, salt, and spices. Add the dry mixture a bit at a time to the wet mixture, stirring until all is smooth and even-textured.
- Pour into prepared dish/pan and bake for about 35 minutes.
- When done, the pudding should be slightly brown around the edges, look dry in the middle, and a toothpick inserted in the middle should come out damp but fairly clean.
Notes:
- Pudding – This is more like an old-fashioned British steamed pudding than the milk/custard type pudding most Americans are familiar with. Imagine a cross between very moist spice cake and pumpkin pie.
- Persimmons – To make persimmon pulp, find windfall wild persimmons (diospyros virginiana) that are fully orange and soft to the touch. Rinse them thoroughly and remove flower-shaped caps. Press them through a mesh sieve or colander with your fingers or a spatula. The resulting pulp can be frozen until you need it. Discard seeds and skins. (The easiest way to clean the sieve afterwards is by taking it out into the garden and using the “jet” attachment on your hose!)
- Pumpkin – Canned pumpkin is fine. To cook your own,
a jack o’ lantern pumpkin won’t work, but you can cut a sugar/pie pumpkin in half, scoop out the seeds/pulp, and bake it upside down in a pan of water at 350 degrees until a fork easily slides through the pumpkin flesh – 30 to 60 minutes.
It is a drizzly afternoon. The house is quiet and smells like baking spices.
On Monday, I met my deadline, turning my manuscript in to my editor. Although I am a little stunned to think I can no longer add to it or snatch back paragraphs that I'm suddenly not sure about, I feel great peace about moving forward. The book is about how to work with family recipes, so spending some enjoyable time this morning working with old fashioned flavors and adjusting recipes reinforces that all the years I worked on the book were well-spent. I did my research well and taught myself some good skills. And soon I'll be able to share those with others.
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