Baked Pumpkin with Walnuts, Honey and Prunes: Autumn Dessert Recipe

In autumn, pumpkin almost always meant pumpkin porridge. At home it was cooked with millet or rice and fresh milk. Now and then, though rarely, the pumpkin was baked in the oven. Or there was pumpkin with nuts, a homemade autumn treat.

I'll admit I wasn't a big fan of the porridge, like any normal kid. Baked pumpkin with honey, though, was another story. Fried pumpkin with honey is very tasty too.

Edible varieties of field pumpkin (Latin Cucurbita pepo) are very easy to digest and are used both in baby food and in therapeutic diets. Pumpkin keeps for a very long time and is still around even in late spring. Remember the Cinderella fairy tale: gardens in bloom all around and huge pumpkins in the vegetable patch. Pure magic.

Besides its culinary virtues, pumpkin is also a material for decorative crafts: lamps, vessels for liquids and so on. In America there is Halloween (All Hallows' Eve, or All Saints' Eve), the eve of All Saints' Day. In the US it means mass scaring of the population and carving lanterns out of pumpkins. A fun holiday.

Actually, Halloween came from the Old World, from the ancient Celts, and by the way it is celebrated not only in the New World but also in France and Great Britain. In recent years this fashion has reached us too, but it is more about scaring the neighbors, as in “Trick or treat”.

Pumpkin dessert with nuts, honey and prunes, with a little lemon, is an amazing dish. It is somewhat like pumpkin porridge, but much more delicate. Another autumn pumpkin dessert is the one with berries and cinnamon.