Love that Pumpkin (Festival)

It must be the colour, or the squishy ball shape but have you noticed that big pumpkins are kid magnets?
 
The annual Collector Pumpkin Festival is held late autumn, just when the pumpkins are ripe. After a couple of frosts here, you have to lift them and bring them inside, so May is also the time to show off your gardening skills and skite to your neighbours about 'how big yours are'.

Here in Collector, a small town off the Federal Highway between Canberra and Goulburn (that in the 1850s was on the main road, a bustling halfway staging post for horse and cart traffic travelling from Sydney to the Goldfields in Kiama), they've probably been celebrating the pumpkin harvest every autumn for at least a hundred years. Right?

Wrong. 2004's event on Sunday May 2, 2004 was just the second time that this small community has celebrated this festival. Yet for all a visitor would know this could have been happening for a hundred years, so well prepared and run was the day. It is this sense of sagra, a 'festival' that Carol Field writes so enthusiastically about, in her book 'Celebrating Italy' (see below).



It was that same sense of appreciation for the Italian regional festivals which prompted James McKay and his wife Kate (above), both of whom worked in Italy, to start their own regional event in Collector. (Kate is the daughter of Robbie Howard who, with her husband Alan, owns Lynwood Café, a big 'good food' draw card to Collector.)

While they worked grape-picking they were involved in local festivals and one particularly impressed them. In Piozzo in Piedmont, the 'sagra della zucca', is a three day event that celebrates the pumpkin. Choosing the pumpkin as a centre for a local festival when they returned, was a clever choice and everyone in the town seemed to embrace the idea. It now looks set to be an annual event that will create its own history.

Designed as a 'family event' the Collector festival has planned well to involve children, with activities from a historical 'treasure hunt' collecting details on tombstones in the nearby cemeteries, to a building a scarecrow and gum boot throwing. For the older and more agile, there was a time trial racing a pumpkin filled wheelbarrow over a bumpy and twisted course.  One impressive display was in the beautiful St. Bartholomew's church, where a collection of notice boards ringed the interior covered in copies and clippings of historical articles that gave a sense of the rich past of the town.




The 'Best Dressed Fence' competition ensured that there were even more pumpkins on display around the town, much to the delight of the passengers in the cars I saw go past.


Lynwood have their own vegetable garden area behind the cafe, and they usually have a respectably large pumpkin or two on display. This year there was row of small ones holding down the corrugated iron.


It was warmer inside the hall's supper room, where there was an open fire and a table to sit by it, if you were quick.

While the number of cooking entries was small, the prize money was very generous, donated by local businesses. This should attract more entries next year. (The full prize details are on the Collector website). First prize in the Pumpkin Scones category was worth $100. That's $16 a scone! Although they looked great and Flo would have approved, far cheaper were the tea and pumpkin scones served by local ladies below, and you could sit by the fire and eat them.

On the next page we've a list of the the festival's food participants that should give you just a taste of the successful day.

Silo entered into the theme with a pumpkin fougasse.  Pumpkin seeds and a herb topping on a sourdough focaccia style bread, with the fougasse's distinctive slashes cut through the loaf.  Fougasse  is a specialty of Provence and the Languedoc, but it almost certainly originated in Italy. In those areas of France it is sometimes called fouacés , or 'hearth bread' . Traditionally it was cooked in the base of the wood fired oven when the embers had been raked out but before it had cooled enough to put normal bread in. If you're into bread making, there's an easy recipe here. (Pop-up window)

'Celebrating Italy' by Carol Field (Published by Harper Collins/Harper Perennial) is the kind of book you read slowly so it lasts. The result of many year's research by Italian cooking authority Carol Field, it has such good dense intense information that it needs to be savoured, The subtitle to the book gives a better description of what to expect from it. "The Tastes & Traditions of Italy as Revealed Through Its Feasts, Festivals & Sumptuous Foods,"

If you're in love with Italy and want to know more about how rich (and strange) the culture and its food can be, you'll love this. If a book with no food pictures (there are lots of small historical illustrations) can move you to try and cook a recipe, the description and recipe has to be special. These are.

There's an excerpt of a few recipes from it here on the publisher's website. But it doesn't give any feeling of why I love the book. It's the sense of the history, religion and mythology that is still part of Italian life that comes out in these many sagra or festivals. Field has broken the year into seasons and listed both strange and spectacular events and the food that accompanies them. You could use this book as a guidebook to a year-long visit as there is something happening almost every weekend somewhere in Italy. The review on Amazon.com has some feel for these traditional aspects.
FH.
 

There's more Festival coverage here