Once in a while, an idea takes hold of me and sets me off on a hamster wheel of adventure—always scrambling, but not quite arriving anywhere. My singular mission the past few weeks has been finding a recipe for pumpkin pie. Not any pie, mind you, but the ice cream pumpkin pie my mother made for Thanksgiving sometime back in the late 1970s. It was the first time I ate pumpkin and I thought it was the most marvelous thing ever. Or maybe it was the pint of vanilla ice cream coupled with pumpkin pie spice.
My mother only made the pie that one Thanksgiving. We had had a blizzard and the lake-effect snow was heavy. We worried if my grandmother and aunt would even make it to our house over frozen roads. The sidewalks sparkled and the snow piles seemed like magical ice tunnels to me. Once they arrived safely, I could only think of the pie. I remember my aunt bundled me up and took me outside to distract me. She held my hand as we walked in the dark and I was scared that the snow mounds would collapse and bury me. How I remember this night is still a mystery to me, as is my desire to recreate the pie this year. But it felt—and still feels—like a kind of compulsion that I could not escape.
When I described the pie to my mother, she told me she no longer had the recipe, so we tried to reconstruct it from our memories. Canned pumpkin, vanilla ice cream, Cool Whip. The ice cream has to be Breyer’s, my mother adds. I remember this part when I’m at the grocery store but choose instead my favorite vanilla gelato. Same difference, I reason to myself, even though I know better. Recipes rely on precision and replicability. When I tasted the pie the other day, I immediately tasted the error I’d made in my ice cream selection.
We’re not a family that documents recipes and passes them down through generations. My grandmother’s claim to fame was an assortment of Ukrainian staples, think pierogies, and baked goods that she somehow made from memory. When my grandmother died, so did her recipes. My mother and I tried to recreate the pierogies one Christmas, but after watching the farmer’s cheese escape our little dough clams, we have settled for Mrs. T’s frozen ever since. I loved everything my mother cooked but I would say her specialty was the spaghetti sauce she learned to make from our neighbor, Mrs. Alessi. There wasn’t a recipe for it; my mother learned by watching. When my mother came to visit a few years ago, I tried to document how she made the sauce and found that, like a lot of great cooks, she cooked more by taste and less by measurement.
The pumpkin pie search had me going through all our cookbooks at home. I realized with some sadness that my husband’s 1973 edition of The Joy of Cooking was now broken into three sections. I relied on it heavily through the years, especially when making Swedish meatballs. Martha Stewart’s cookbook failed me even though her almond cookies are a household favorite. My grandmother’s Betty Crocker Cookbook (new and revised, 1978) still has the best apple pie recipe and—behold!—a recipe for Frosty Pumpkin Pie. I looked at the ingredients (crystalized ginger? walnuts?) and realized quickly it was not my mother’s pie.
After exhausting my mother’s memory and my collection of cookbooks, I turned to the internet. I tried various search terms and kept coming up with two results: the traditional baked pumpkin pie recipe, and weird recipes from the 1970s. Probably my favorite discovery was a gelatin mold made of SpaghettiOs with cut up hot dogs in the middle. I offered to deliver this dish to my friend Ron for Thanksgiving, but he never wrote me back. Another time, perhaps.
The closest pumpkin ice cream pie recipe I could find was the recipe from the back of a can of Libby’s canned pumpkin. The last place I looked, of course. According to the manufacturer’s recipe, the ice cream and pumpkin are in separate layers, but that’s not how I remembered the pie. In my mind, it was a fluffy pumpkin ice cream cloud resting atop a graham cracker crust, the ice cream melted just so, which made the grahams deliciously soggy. How can I possibly remember this? Perhaps my brain filled in all of the tasty details. I decided to experiment with the Libby’s recipe, mixing all the ingredients together. Like my mother, I found myself taking extra tastes to make sure I had enough pumpkin pie spice. It tasted OK, but I reasoned it would taste even better once everything had time to meld and freeze. I took some pride in knowing that it looked like what I remembered. As I slid the almost-overflowing spring pan into the freezer, it occurred to me that it’s been over 40 years since I had that pie.
The closest pumpkin ice cream pie recipe I could find was the recipe from the back of a can of Libby’s canned pumpkin. The last place I looked, of course. According to the manufacturer’s recipe, the ice cream and pumpkin are in separate layers, but that’s not how I remembered the pie. In my mind, it was a fluffy pumpkin ice cream cloud resting atop a graham cracker crust, the ice cream melted just so, which made the grahams deliciously soggy. How can I possibly remember this? Perhaps my brain filled in all of the tasty details. I decided to experiment with the Libby’s recipe, mixing all the ingredients together. Like my mother, I found myself taking extra tastes to make sure I had enough pumpkin pie spice. It tasted OK, but I reasoned it would taste even better once everything had time to meld and freeze. I took some pride in knowing that it looked like what I remembered. As I slid the almost-overflowing spring pan into the freezer, it occurred to me that it’s been over 40 years since I had that pie.
The pumpkin ice cream pie came out all right. I could only criticize it as not matching up to my memory, but it had its own kind of pumpkin-y goodness. My husband tells me it was delicious. I took a picture and sent it to my mom. I confessed that it wasn’t as good as hers. “That looks really good,” she wrote back. “It’s been so long since I made it, anything is good.” I decided to make it again, but with her ice cream suggestion. Her text message reminded me to take a win when I can—that it is possible to create a new memory not to replace an old one, but to live adjacent. I can hold two variations of ice cream pumpkin pie in my head. And aren’t two dessert options always better than one?
I realize now that my compulsion was rooted not in finding the recipe, but in something I’ve been ignoring this whole time. My aunt died more than 30 years ago now. I knew we wouldn’t see my parents this year for Thanksgiving. We wouldn’t even be able to share a meal with friends. I was clinging to this recipe as a life raft to take me back to the people I love and the awe I felt walking in the icy dark night. So long ago, now, but always in my memory as the best Thanksgiving ever.
