Recipe: Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good (with bread stuffing)

PUMPKIN STUFFED WITH EVERYTHING GOOD
"You might consider serving this alongside the Thanksgiving turkey or even instead of it - omit the bacon and you've got a great vegetarian main course."



Makes 2 very generous servings or 4 side servings

1 pumpkin, about 3 pounds
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 pound stale bread, thinly sliced and cut into 1/2-inch chunks
1/4 pound cheese, such as Gruyere, Emmenthal, cheddar, or a combination, cut into 1/2-inch chunks
2 to 4 garlic cloves (to taste), split, germ removed, and coarsely chopped
4 strips bacon, cooked until crisp, drained, and chopped
About 1/4 cup snipped fresh chives or sliced scallions
1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme
About 1/3 cup heavy (whipping) cream
Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with a silicone baking mat or parchment, or find a Dutch oven with a diameter that's just a tiny bit larger than your pumpkin. If you bake the pumpkin in a casserole, it will keep its shape, but it might stick to the casserole, so you'll have to serve it from the pot - which is an appealingly homey way to serve it. If you bake it on a baking sheet, you can present it freestanding, but maneuvering a heavy stuffed pumpkin with a softened shell isn't so easy. However, since I love the way the unencumbered pumpkin looks in the center of the table, I've always taken my chances with the baked-on-a-sheet method, and so far, I've been lucky.

Using a very sturdy knife - and caution - cut a cap out of the top of the pumpkin (think Halloween jack-o'-lantern). It's easiest to work your knife around the top of the pumpkin at a 45-degree angle. You want to cut off enough of the top to make it easy for you to work inside the pumpkin. Clear away the seeds and strings from the cap and from inside the pumpkin. Season the inside of the pumpkin generously with salt and pepper, and put it on the baking sheet or in the pot.

Toss the bread, cheese, garlic, bacon, and herbs together in a bowl. Season with pepper - you probably have enough salt from the bacon and cheese, but taste to be sure - and pack the mix into the pumpkin. The pumpkin should be well filled - you might have a little too much filling, or you might need to add to it. Stir the cream with the nutmeg and some salt and pepper and pour it into the pumpkin. Again, you might have too much or too little - you don't want the ingredients to swim in cream, but you do want them nicely moistened. (But it's hard to go wrong here.)

Put the cap in place and bake the pumpkin for about 2 hours - check after 90 minutes - or until everything inside the pumpkin is bubbling and the flesh of the pumpkin is tender enough to be pierced easily with the tip of a knife. Because the pumpkin will have exuded liquid, I like to remove the cap during the last 20 minutes or so, so that the liquid can bake away and the top of the stuffing can brown a little.

When the pumpkin is ready, carefully, very carefully - it's heavy, hot, and wobbly - bring it to the table or transfer it to a platter that you'll bring to the table.

STORING:
It's really best to eat this as soon as it's ready. However, if you've got leftovers, you can scoop them out of the pumpkin, mix them up, cover, and chill them; reheat them the next day.

RECIPE NOTES:
I've got a slideshow of random snapshots that runs as a screensaver on my computer, and every time the picture of pumpkins for sale at Scott's Farm Stand in Essex, Connecticut, comes up, I smile. In the picture, it's a sunny day and the pumpkins, scattered higgledy-piggledy across a big field, look like so many roly-poly playthings. Some people might squint and imagine the jack-o-lanterns that many of these pumpkins are destined to become. Me? I see them sitting in the middle of my dining table, their skins burnished from the heat of the oven and their tops mounded with bubbly cheese and cream. Ever since Catherine, a friend of mine in Lyon, France, told me about how she and her family stuff pumpkins with bread and cheese and bacon and garlic and herbs and cream, I can't look at a pumpkin on either side of the Atlantic without thinking, "Dinner!"

Of course, pumpkins are a New World vegetable, but I'm seeing them more and more in the Paris markets, which means I'm making this dish more and more wherever I am. It's less a recipe than an arts and crafts project; less a formula than a template to play with and make your own.

Basically - and it's really very basic - you hollow out a small pumpkin, just as you would for a jack-o-lantern, salt and pepper the inside, and then start filling it up. My standard recipe, the one Catherine sent to me, involves seasoning chunks of stale bread, tossing them with bacon and garlic, cubes of cheese (when I'm in France, I use Gruyere or Emmenthal; when I'm in the States, I opt for cheddar) and some herbs, packing the pumpkin with this mix and then pouring in enough cream to moisten it all.

But there's nothing to stop you from using leftover cooked rice instead of bread - I did that one night and it was risotto-like and fabulous - or from adding dried fruit and chopped nuts, cooked spinach or Swiss chard, or apples or pears, fall's favored fruits. And I was crazy about the dish when I stirred some cooked hot sausage meat into the mix.

The possibilities for improvisation don't end with the filling: You've got a choice about the way to serve this beauty. I think you should always bring it to the table whole - you wouldn't want to deprive your guests of the chance to ooh and aah - but whether you should slice or scoop is up to you. If you serve it in slices, you get a wedge of pumpkin piled high with the filling, and that's pretty dramatic (if something this rustic can be called 'dramatic'). The wedge serving is best eaten with a knife and fork (or knife and spoon). If you scoop, what you do is reach into the pumpkin with a big spoon, scrape the cooked pumpkin meat from the sides of the pumpkin into the center, and stir everything around. Do this and you'll have a kind of mash - not so pretty, but so delicious.

Catherine serves it scooped. I serve it sliced sometimes and scooped others. Either way, I can't imagine this won't become an instant fall favorite chez you." - Dorie Greenspan

Source: Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan