Rodger Whitlock wrote:

I was shocked and horrified to read Nick McLaren's diatribes against
pumpkin pie. He obviously has never had good pumpkin pie. Or else he
was frightened by a rabid pumpkin as a small lad.

To set the record straight, here's *my* recipe for pumpkin pie:
[snip]
Some remarks: this is my mother's recipe, slightly modified to use
less sugar;

The standard one I've eaten must use several kg of cane sugar. I'm with
Nick on this one. The English have a sweet tooth but the US "pumpkin
pie" is beyond the pale and sickly sweet. Even fudge tastes savoury by
comparison.

Note that the recipe calls for canned pumpkin. No North American in
his right mind bothers with processing his own pumpkin; it's way too
much work, when you consider that high quality canned pumpkin is
available everywhere for next to nothing. It's a real bargain food.

Can you not get canned pumpkin in the UK?

We can grow them. There isn't much call for canned pumpkin as no-one can
really stomach pumpkin pie - even those of us that are quite omnivorous.

Thanks for the pie recipe but I prefer my pumpkins with ginger as winter
soup.

Regards,
Martin Brown