Editor’s Note: Marlow grapples this bright cheery morning with the change of our traditional seasons due to COVID restrictions. It is better than watching the disparate narratives play out. I was looking for The Kraken one side said they were about to release this week. We will see, I suppose. In the meantime, here is the view in The Great Room at Refuge Farm, and our view of what to celebrate:

– Vic

Dessert Season

Author’s Note: With 2020’s seasons of the witches in our rear-view mirrors, W and I finalized this year’s bird day meal courses and shopping lists. When we decided we’d tree-shop and erect our Christmas decorations a week or two before Thanksgiving, my mind wandered into that fantastical world of my distant past. This piece resulted.

-Marlow

Some call the coming five weeks the holiday season. Since my earliest years, I have steadfastly called it dessert season. Oh, and Thanksgiving has the best desserts. No other holiday is even close.

You can forget Easter, Christmas, Anniversaries, Patriotic Holidays, and Birthdays. Thanksgiving is the dessert king. First, before you even get to that part of the meal, what should be dessert items snuck into the main course. We’re talkin’ about cranberry sauce, something that is amazing and becomes even more amazing when paired with turkey. Along with cranberry sauce at our long-ago November gatherings, one of the attending families would bring sweet fruit breads made from old family recipes that dated back to Civil War Washington DC (apple, pumpkin, lemon). All hail these dessert-dinner line straddlers.

My childhood dessert season’s main event was an endless supply of pies –- apple, pumpkin, cherry, berry, chocolate, lemon, raisin, and all their creamed, milked, ice creamed, caramelled, moussed, crisped, and boozed varieties.

Now special mention must be made for nut pies like pecan, walnut and the like. Most were originally simple, colonial era, New England versions. Once I had journeyed through and lived in the Old South, props must be paid to their superior adulterations like Bourbon/Orange Pecan pie.

Now some argue that it’s pumpkin pie that makes this dessert season what it is. Others say that apple and chocolate pies are objectively better than their pumpkin brother. Chocolate and apple pie supporters claim that pumpkin pie lovers are victims of its primary ingredient’s false scarcity and association bias. We Americans have been hard-wired to value scarce seasonal resources since this season’s 1621 debut. Pumpkin lovers make their pumpkin pies because they are supposed to and their association with objectively important and rewarding family holidays.

Yeah, yeah, yeah — pumpkin may be a bland, freeloading, poseur of a pie filling and flavoring. There is also great reason to detest pumpkin since it adulterates my beer and coffee. Blecch!!

But pumpkin’s meh-ness, when unlocked with cinnamon, sugar, spices and cream, becomes magical. Its texture is superb. But to repeat myself — not in my damn beer.

Straight up, dessert season, standard-recipe pie rankings (i.e., with no modern customizing)
Pecan
Pumpkin
Coconut cream
Key Lime
Apple
Black-not-blue-berry

NB Dead last is Lemon Meringue. Meringue is both tasteless and nasty. Deader than dead last are rhubarb pie and all its evil wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing progeny like strawberry-rhubarb.

Now some will assert that dessert season’s best are cake and cookies, since pies are for suckers. While I will admit that a single well-made cake is better than a single pie, there is no holiday where you get multiple cakes. Dessert season blesses us every year with multiple pies. Winner, winner, turkey, dressing and multiple-pies-for-dessert dinner.

PS Humble pie is always out of supply during this season.

PPS Come at me, bro, with your social justice arguments for cheesecake pies. You shall not prevail. It’s a cake.

PPS Please excuse my not mentioning sweet potato or yam pies, since they are most excellent line straddlers — brown sugar + marshmallows for dinner? Hell yes.

Copyright © 2020 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com