In September 1969, Dick
and I began our year in the
wilderness on the edge of
the BWCWA in the Superior
National Forest. Our small
cabin had neither road access
nor amenities. This is a reprint
of one of many stories about
our lives during that special
year.
Halloween on Tucker Lake was very quiet, but one good thing resulted. I’ve never baked a better tasting pumpkin pie.
Visiting friends had brought a pumpkin that carved on Halloween day. At twilight, I placed it on a stump behind the cabin and watched it grin eerily in the dark night, hoping our malamute might have some reaction, but she was more interested in a strange scent the wind was carrying down the lakeshore and never noticed my goofy Halloween prop.
Eventually, I blew out the candle in my “woodland” jack o’ lantern and went to bed. As I said, it was a very quiet Halloween.
The next morning, I eyed the pumpkin as potential food. Canned pumpkin was the only kind I knew, but where did canned pumpkin come from if not directly from a pumpkin? Why not boil down the jack-olantern and bake it in a shell?
The late fall weather was drizzly that morning. A cold wind spattered raindrops against the cabin windows as Tucker Lake slowly solidified into one big ice slab. What better activity than to bake a fragrant spicy pie? As I cut the orange vegetable into small pieces, the sound of Dick’s chainsaw echoed faintly through the trees.
The pie project was not as easy as I’d hoped. Thepumpkin pieces took their own sweet time to cook, and my Coleman stove worked overtime to keep water boiling. When Dick came in for lunch, soaking wet and hungry, he glanced at the simmering pumpkin pieces.
“Pumpkin pie,” I said. “Hopefully it will turn out, and we’ll have it for dessert tonight.” Following a bowl of soup, he returned to the damp dripping forest for an afternoon of more work, and I resumed my cooking challenge.
While the dog slept in front of the door, I rolled out a piecrust and fired the Franklin Fireplace. By now the pumpkin pieces were tender, so I mashed them and added an egg and a goodly amount of brown sugar, figuring that sugar never hurt anything.
I sprinkled in a little ginger and some cinnamon, then searched my small cupboard and finally found some nutmeg. A minute of sheer panic struck when I remembered custard pie required milk, but a can of evaporated milk saved the moment. As I poured the gooey wet mixture into the piecrust, I wondered if this stuff could really turn out.
It did. The pie—tucked safely inside my Dutch oven and set on an iron grate— baked beautifully over glowing red embers. Thefragrant spicy smell filled the cabin and lifted the gloomy atmosphere.
We ate the pie, delicious even without whipped cream, and I proudly wrote about my baking accomplishment in the next week’s letters home. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the technique, just assumed it would stick in my memory.
It didn’t. Next year I tried to duplicate my wonderful Tucker pumpkin pie in a modern kitchen with an electric oven and all the conveniences, but when the pie was finished, it was not the best pumpkin pie I’d ever made.
It was one of the worst, watery and flavorless.
For several years, I tried to repeat my Tucker Lake pumpkin pie but never succeeded. Maybe the wood stove had created a better flavor. Possibly I’d been more patient on Tucker Lake. Maybe we’d been hungrier.
Eventually I quit trying to duplicate my “scratch” pumpkin pie and went back to the canned filling version.
But the memory of my Tucker Lake pumpkin pie still lingers.
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