Important Thanksgiving Week Message

…no, not important to you. (Er, not to denigrate your importance.) This is important to me.

See, I’ve got this one recipe I cook once, sometimes twice every year. It’s a recipe for Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie. I’ve made it every year since first finding it in a “holiday recipes” brochure from an actual God-do-they-still-exist? A&P grocery store in Clinton, NJ, in 1986 or so. So you’d think I’d have committed it to memory by now.

You would think wrong. (Er, not to denigrate your intelligence.) After all (I tell myself, by way of excuses), I make it only once a year.

In any case, every year around now I go through the same torture of not having the recipe on hand. After, oh, eight years or so, the brochure started to fall apart. Eventually that specific page did become separated from the others, and for a few years it managed to get lost in a stack of recipes (mostly culled by The Missus) from newspapers and magazines — whence I would excavate it, after a half-hour or more of feverish fieldwork.

Finally, worried that I might lose it altogether, I typed it up and made about a dozen copies, which I then proceeded to secure in various locations around the house where I might think to look for them every year: inside other cookbooks, in various pantries and cupboards, even upstairs on the shelf over my computer. “Just in case,” you see, and a good thing too because as far as I know I am now down to my last copy. (It’s the one I found just this morning — the day of the Thanksgiving-grocery-shopping excursion — on the shelf over my computer.)

So this is for me: a permanent place for me to find the recipe every year.

Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie

(courtesy of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, c. 1986ish)

Ingredients:

• Single-crust pastry
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup packed brown sugar (dark brown looks more pumpkiny, because the sour cream washes the color out some)
• ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 16-oz. can pumpkin (NOT pumpkin “mix” — just straight pumpkin. And good luck finding a 16-ouncer; they all seem to be 15 ounces anymore. Which is actually fine for this recipe, because there’s almost always leftover filling.)
• 2 cups sour cream
• ½ cup raisins, if desired (I’ve never used them)
• Sweetened whipped cream (recipe below)
• Chopped candied orange peel or pecan halves

Procedure:

• “Prepare pastry” (covers gamut of pastry ambitions; I’ve been using the roll-up kind from the dairy section of the supermarket — may one day make my own, but not likely)
• In a medium bowl, combine eggs, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt.
• Beat with a wire whip or rotary beater until smooth. (I’ve never used an electric mixer.)
• Add pumpkin and mix well.
• Stir sour cream in carton(s).
• Gently stir sour cream into pumpkin until well blended.
• Stir in raisins, if desired.
• Pour into unbaked pie shell. (IMPORTANT: This is what the original instructions say. They never have worked for me this way, though; the crust is always underdone. Thus, I lightly “pre-bake” (is that a word?!?) the pie shell before pouring the filling in.)
• Bake in a 425° oven 15 minutes.
• Reduce heat to 350°.
• Continue baking 35 to 40 minutes or until filling is almost set.
• Cool. Store in refrigerator.
• Serve garnished with sweetened whipped cream (below) and (if desired) chopped candied orange peel or pecan halves.

Somewhere in there, of course, is the cleanup period. During this time do not hesitate to sample any leftover filling by licking beaters, spoons, whatever you have handy (including, of course, fingers). The Missus thinks this is a bad idea, because of the raw eggs. I think it’s worth the risk.

Sweetened whipped cream:

• Whip 1 cup heavy cream until soft peaks form.
• Gently stir in 2 tablespoons powdered sugar and ½ teaspoon vanilla.
• Chill until ready to serve. (Stir before serving.)

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That’s it. And no, this is not my regular blog post for the day. But if I don’t get this posted now I am convinced I’ll never get around to it and then, well, what will I do next Thanksgiving?!?