You should try shoo-fly pie. It’s like pecan pie minus the pecans, just all goop.
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Came here to say just this. Although I prefer pecan pie for the texture, though the pecans make my tongue hurt so much. Plus shoofly pie is molasses-based, so it’s deeper and richer and stickier.
Fun fact: pecan pie was invented by the Karo syrup company as a way to use lots of corn syrup!
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Hmm. You must be either not from the South, or you spent way too much time there.
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this is not only an an unpopular opinion but an oh-so-wrong one
rhubarb pie in all variations is excellent
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Now you have me dreaming of a rhubarb pie with a pecan crumble topping. I suppose one person’s dream is another’s nightmare.
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I don’t know what Rhubarb is, but it is good in pie, especially with strawberries.
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Rhubarb is poisonous! Don’t eat it!
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Rhubarb looks almost exactly like bright-red celery. Its leaves are very poisonous but when you cook the stalks correctly they have a tart, berry sort of flavor. My other favorite rhubarb usage is paired with cherries – they use it like that in sauces and refreshing cold soup at Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant.
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Now easily available as a Snopes link for all your Facebook friends posts: http://www.snopes.com/canned-pumpkin-isnt-actually-pumpkin/
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How do you know so much about pie?
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Was meant to be a joke based on the snopes link. Never mind…
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I’m from Ohio, and my grandmother was a pie-making fiend! We always had two or three pies at every family gathering. Pumpkin, pecan, rhubarb, chess pie, mince pie, apple, cherry, shoofly… always with handmade crusts. She had an unfortunate habit of sneaking finely-grated carrots into pies (to “improve our eyesight”) but otherwise I miss her pies.
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≈175 posts without anyone pointing out that the article is making a No True Pumpkin argument?
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I know Jefferson was big on growing pumpkins for his livestock, but I don’t know that the notion of foodstuffs as “livestock fodder” is universally true. Pumpkins are used everywhere, including places where animals were traditionally raised to make use of plant materials that human beings can’t eat, e.g. grass growing on land unsuitable for crops. (The idea that you would feed animals something that a human being could eat just didn’t enter people’s heads.) I’m also just thinking of very modern, highly refined dishes that involve a good deal of added sugar - e.g. the pumpkin halwa made in the Middle East or Thai sweet custard cooked in a pumpkin.
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How much do you actually know about animal husbandry and its recentish history? First and foremost the “grass growing on land unsuitable for crops” isn’t so much a thing. While the sort of vast pastureland that exists in the US (and some other primarily pastoral countries) is sometimes on land that would not be farmable. Grass pasture for subsistence (rather than commodity) and polyculture farming is most often grown deliberately as part of standard crop rotation. Its a cover that allows the land to sit fallow for x number of growing seasons to regain nutrients. 2nd not all livestock eat grass. Pigs and chickens in particular do not, though chickens eat seeds and sprouts/very young growth (makes them great for keeping down weeds). And in terms of the time period we’re talking about pigs and chickens were the dominant livestock that people actually lived off of. Dairy cows were a nice bonus, if you could afford them. Goats were something of a general use, dairy producing bonus. Beef cows and sheep (typically for wool) were more of a commodity product. You raised them for sale, not to live off of. And it required a certain level of relative wealth to get into those businesses.
2nd ruminants like cows sheep and goats. Often can’t be fed only on grass. Both because many breeds have been bred to grow too fast, and burn too many calories for grass alone to provide (to maximize meat or dairy production) and because seasonally there isn’t always fresh grass in most places. Ruminants, generally, can’t eat fully grown long grasses either. Though IIRC that’s sort of what bison are for. Some supplementation is neccisary. And Hay, which is just dry grass. Isn’t a suitable supplement or off season replacement. Its just not very nutritionally dense. traditionally, particularly in those places with lots of open/wild pasture, a major supplements is silage, basically fermented grass. Pigs and chickens can be fed on kitchen scraps and forage. But especially during winter something additional is needed to keep them alive. So certain crops, going back a really long time have traditionally been raised primarily as animal fodder. Today we go with corn and soybeans (and we’ve given up on thinking of it as a supplemental feed). In the past for Europe oats were a big one. Almost exclusively grown as animal fodder. Barley too, as both fodder and for brewing rather than as a staple grain. Popular and literary accounts of poverty/famine in Europe are loaded with references to people “resorting” to eating oats and barley in place of wheat. And the English apparently mocked the Irish and Scottish (especially the Scottish) for doing so as a matter of course, not as a last resort.
So it didn’t just occur to people to feed animals things humans could eat, it was often a necessity. Especially for those pigs, which like humans are omnivores. There’s a big tradition for peanut fed pork in the US. Especially down south, and the tradition dates back precivil war. Even to the colonial period. To the point where peanuts were grown here mostly for animal fodder until the US government promoted them as people food.
Oats, and barley were two big ones. Turnips too. And I’m reasonably sure pumpkins, at least in the US, fall into the same category. It didn’t much make sense, particularly for poor or subsistence farmers to grow animal fodder that wasn’t edible to humans. And while the general population would resort to eating these things in times of hardship. The poor, subsistence farmers, and agrarian classes. Meaning the sort of people who had to grow most if not all of their food. Ate them as a matter of course. Seldom a staple (like potato, wheat, etc), but an important supplement. Even when the vast bulk of what was produced was intended to feed livestock.
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Confirmed: That latte is 100% not a real pumpkin.
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#notallsquash
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Marrows are basically giant courgette so the skin is harder and the seeds and stringy bit in the middle need to be scraped out with a spoon. I roast them and stuff them with a passatta , opinions, beans sauce with chorizo or olives and recently with loads of winter savoury which is like oregano but spicy hot and other herbs to give it a kind of provencale flavour.
@billstewart totally yes. Edible squashes. So you can just cut and roast some up and hull the seeds out, rinse off the stringy stuff and roast the seeds with spices to your taste. They will be ready before anything else and are a fantastic snack with beer or something.
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In Northern Europe barley is a great crop rotation (plus winter barley is great for the lean months) but oats in the cooler parts were definitely more for the people. Barley for livestock, beer, and rotation.
Oat porridge during hard times had the dairy cow bled into it for feast days. Or so I’m told. Though black, blood pudding, used pigs blood. And is really trendy again from being despised when I was younger.
Grass and silage fed cows are the norm but wetter summers due to global warming put the grass culture u dear threat and some summers in the last couple of decades have seen large amounts of fodder having to be used as the land was too wet to pasture cows on. Plus the draining and deforestation of uplands to bpcrreate more pasture floods downstream pasture. It would be a tragedy if we moved away from grass pasture raised cattle in Ireland I think.
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So is pecan pie, if you don’t use the Karo Syrup recipe.
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