What happened to my pumpkin pie?

I have cherished memories of holiday meals from my childhood. Certain foods were always on the table for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it just wasn’t a festive spread without them. Pumpkin pie for dessert was a must. But that was many years ago and 8,000 kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean and the pie I bake today is quite different from the one my mother made.  

Pumpkins originally come from America. Although first imported to Europe centuries ago, they were not always as popular as they are now, particularly in Germany. Also, Germany was not nearly as Americanized several decades ago as it is today. There were virtually no breakfast cereals on the shelves, hardly any American candy, fewer processed foods, and the basic ingredient for pumpkin pie was missing, too. 

You might think that ingredient would be pumpkin, which is very wholesome of you and I encourage you to keep up your unprocessed diet principle of “no trash.” But when I was growing up, processed foods were all the rage. So in my family, we used what most people did to make pumpkin pie, lovingly referred to as “pumpkin stuff,” which was canned pumpkin. You just had to open the can (which we did with our automatic can opener, of course; wouldn’t want to exert too much effort for something we’re putting in our bodies), add spices, eggs, and condensed milk, pour it into a pie shell and bake it. 

Welcome to 1970s American cuisine. It was a culinary Wild West of pre-packaged food, ready-made ingredients and unresearched chemicals. Yee-hah!

But not only did Germany have no pumpkin mix, they didn’t even have pumpkins. This is hard to fathom today, looking at the roadside tables here piled high with the giant orange fruit, just like in the U.S. It’s easy for me to wax nostalgic while standing at one of these tables, remembering the pumpkin patches at home—right up until a BMW or Mercedes roars up beside me, interrupting my reverie. This is Germany after all.

The large-scale cultivation of pumpkins became noticeable here at some point in the 1990s. But this was not to satisfy my craving for pumpkin pie but rather to bolster a growing Halloween tradition. There was money to be made. I quickly learned how to bake a pumpkin for a pie—and was embarrassed to discover how easy it was.

Feeling smug about this new expertise, during an October visit to my sister one year, I encouraged her to bake her Halloween pumpkin, too, instead of letting it rot on the front porch as usual. She thought I was out of my mind and told me so, inviting me with a sneer to do it myself. 

“I’ll show her,” I thought. Not only did I bake it, I pureed it, divided it up into the cups of a muffin tin for freezing, then removed the frozen portions and stored them in a plastic bag. These would be perfect for use in pie or soup. Martha Stewart would have been proud. My 1970s-style-cooking mother would have been perplexed at all the effort. 

But what I did not consider was my father, who was living with my sister at the time. Alone during the day, he would fix meals by scrounging around in the kitchen to see if there were any leftovers. After all, it’s a dad’s job to eat these leftovers—God forbid they learn how to cook mere decades after separating from their wives—and my father took that duty very seriously. 

Now, what you must understand is that this was a man who insisted on eating burnt toast, which was fine, once you scraped off the ashes, even if what remained was only a third of the toast. He also made jumbo-sized bowls of popcorn that he would feed off of for a week, right down to the