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Homes

Front Porch: The face value of pumpkins

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published October 21, 2005

Nothing speaks the language of fall like a hand-carved pumpkin: the real, messy kind with a gap-toothed, bad-boy grin and a devilish wink that you carve yourself in the driveway in a flash of Rodin-inspired creativity.

I haven't carved a pumpkin in years, but the sight of them perched on hay bales at the grocery store recently filled me with nostalgia. The memory of spreading the newspaper on the patio table with my father and little sisters and carving paisley eyes and crooked laughs still makes me smile.

Even as a young adult living in the North, I remember buying pumpkins straight from the farm fields and using them around my house as a cheap decoration.

I always preferred the Charlie Brown underdog variety, cherishing them as much uncarved as carved. I loved their earthy, burnished color - the deeper, more paprika-orange, the better. The best ones were always a little uneven, with crazy stems and lopsided stances.

They looked gorgeous grouped in clusters on a coffee table or out front on the steps of my house, adding a blush of fall color even on a gray day.

Arranged in a scattering of fall leaves on a dining room table, they proved gorgeous and inexpensive centerpieces.

When I did eventually carve them, my skills proved no better than when I was a child. But in the end, the effort always produced a sort of homage to autumn: The jack-o'-lantern's jittery glow illuminated my window in the evenings before Halloween, greeting the start of the holiday season, bringing light to the longer nights and shorter days.

The tradition of carving a face in a pumpkin, I recently learned, comes from England, Ireland and Scotland, where people once carved faces in potatoes, beets and turnips and placed the lanterns in windows and doorways to shoo away evil spirits. Early American immigrants found the pumpkin, a fruit native to the continent, easier to carve, making for a more superior jack-o'-lantern. The name refers to a legendary spirit figure - Jack of the Lantern - who supposedly roams the earth toting a burning coal in a carved-out turnip.

For those of us hoping to perfect our modern-day carving skills, Publix's Apron's Cooking School offers three classes in pumpkin carving this month. The classes, for both adults and children, are Monday, Oct. 29 and 30 at the Citrus Park Publix, 7835 Gunn Highway.

The key to carving a good-looking pumpkin, says Publix spokeswoman Leslie Spencer, is threefold: Draw your design or face first on paper, then stencil it out with pencil on the pumpkin. After you carve the top off and scrape out all the seeds, scrape out more meat on the side where you intend to carve the face so you "cut through a lot less rind."

To prolong your pumpkin's life in the Florida humidity, Spencer says, cut a few drainage holes in the bottom and then elevate it slightly so that air can circulate, keeping it dry.

For more tips on pumpkin carving, there are also myriad Web sites devoted to the craft. A couple of my favorites include the Pumpkin Wizard, www.carvingpumpkins.com; Walt's Pumpkin Carving Secrets, http://wls.wwco.com/garden/pumpkin.html and Pam's Pumpkin Patch, www.damsiteinn.com/pumpkins.htm. On the front porch or the kitchen counter, a real jack-o'-lantern not only adds decorative warmth, but its dusky aroma coaxes back memories of something lost. With the ubiquitous bounty of manufactured holiday tchotchkes, substitutes are easy to find, even on drugstore shelves.

Hoping to avoid the work of carving last year, I bought a primitive, carved metal pumpkin that allows me simply to drop a candle inside and light. But it's no substitute for the labor intensive, real, quirky, pungent variety.

When it comes to a pumpkin, who can resist a little imperfection - a crooked grin and wink glowing by candlelight on a dark fall night?

[Last modified October 20, 2005, 09:03:09]