Where to find the best Irish pumpkins and a recipe for homemade pumpkin spice
If you happen upon a pumpkin patch, here is what to cook with your bounty. Picture: iStock
It’s the season of mist, mellow fruitfulness - and pumpkins. Whether they’re piled high in supermarkets or corralled in a huge wooden box at Mitchelstown’s weekly market, pumpkins have become a ubiquitous part of the autumn experience. But it wasn’t always so. Growing up in the '80s, our jack o’ lanterns were carved out of turnips (or potatoes, when my mother refused to hand over that night’s veg), very much in keeping with the ancient Irish festival of Samhain.
Long before I started wrestling with a turnip for Halloween, Irish immigrants had taken the old tradition of carving scary faces into vegetables with them to America, discovering there that pumpkins were far easier to work with. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that the large, orange monsters started to make inroads into Irish homes, although - at that stage - perhaps not into our kitchens.
