Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 January 1886 — A Recipe for Pumpkin Pies. [ARTICLE]

A Recipe for Pumpkin Pies.

A subscriber writes to his favorite journal asking how to make the same kind of pumpkin pies that were made when he was a boy, and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. We regret to chill his desire for knowledge, but it is our duty to do so. They can’t be made. They don’t grow the same kind of pumpkins now. The sun never shines down on the old corn-field the same way it did thirty odd years ago. ' There has come some sort of change over the climate that scientists all recognize and that bears a polysyllabic name that he wouldn’t understand any better than we do. If he doesn’t believe it, let him walk out, some summer afternoon, between the towering rows of nodding corn-stalks, and note the difference. Jt is hotter than it used to be, and not half so invigorating. Then, the soil has changed, too. It sticks to his boots in a way that was unknown to his bare feet in those days of the very long ago. The pumpkins are still there, we suppose. Market reports and the columns of country newspapers stdl chronicle their growth and the enormous sizes they attain, as of yore; but the flavor I That has gone as irretrievably as the mud-pies which used to turn their brown sides up to the sun when all of us were young. The pumpkins of the present day are squashlike in taste, thin, watery, and unsatisfactory. The crust of the pie is hard, soggy, and indigestible. The flour and the ovens are changed. And although this is an age of progress, the art of pie-making has not kept up with its fellows in the march of,,improvement. Perhaps this is owing to the introduction of the stove, and the abolition of the old-fashioned brick oven. There was something about those old brick ovens that gave pie-crust a flakiness and tenderness which is noticeable in modern pies principally by its absence. No, the old-fashioned pumpkih-pie has passed away. It belongs to a bygone age. In its place we have machine- , made pies, put up by the gross and

carted around in wagons. The only way for our knowledge-thirsting friend to taste again those viands of the past is for him to seat himself beside his grate, some cool fall evening, light his pipe, close bis eyes, and dream of the old farm-house among the hills and the Thanksgiving dinner of his boyhood, when his grandmother presided over the table, and the pumpkjn-pie came on in a tin dish, square at the confers, and deep enough to hold ten dozen bf the pie-plates of the present day.' This may not satisfy his hunger and sustain life, but it is the only way that the man of thd present can ever hope to taste the pumpkin-pie of the boy of the past generation. — Puck.