Swiss Pumpkin: Reichl disappoints

When I was growing up, I loved reading Ruth Reichl's autobiographical book Tender At the Bone. I identified with a child who grew up in the kitchen, as my parents regarded my sisters and I as really short sous chefs. (Parents, I jest.) I once tried to make a tart that she describes as transcendental, but I found it pretty pedestrian. "Surely," I thought, "surely I must have gotten it wrong!" I tried closing my eyes while eating it, but it was seriously underwhelming.

I'm beginning to think Ruth Reichl is just terrible at recipes (not to mention relationships. Burn!), because yesterday, Alice and I made her recipe for Swiss Pumpkin and it was terrible. We had gotten a free pumpkin at Harvest Fest, and weren't sure what to do with it, so I suggested this recipe that I had read about so many times. Reichl invented it and apparently made it multiple times for lots of people, all of whom received it favorably.

Here's how it works. You hollow out a pumpkin, layer it with French bread and some kind of Swiss cheese, then fill it up with cream and bake it at 300 for 2 hours. Simple enough. I remembered my mother making this for us when I was little, ladling out pumpkin soup straight from the pumpkin. We swapped cream for whole milk because we could get that free from the dining halls and took some cheddar from lunch. I knew it probably wouldn't taste as strong, but figured it would work out fine. For bread we went to Hungry Ghost and got a French batard that had made astounding French toast that day for breakfast. Everything was ready to go.

I first became suspicious when the recipe called for hardly any seasoning. Nutmeg, black pepper, and salt was all that was mentioned. We added some fresh chives from my Mason jar garden, but for some reason the spices were added last, on top of the milk. Then the pumpkin started to leak from the bottom. It was a little leak, but we were worried that all the milk would dribble out and the whole thing would be ruined. Desperate, we stopped up the bottom with extra bread and baked it in a baking dish.

It smelled pretty good. We scooped out some bread and cheese into teacups and took a bite.

It was bland. So bland. It was soggy, milky bread and some chunks of pumpkin. It tasted like high-end baby food, if your baby will only eat food served straight from a gourd. And in that moment, I remembered why my mother only made this recipe once: because it's not delicious.

At least it only cost five bucks to make.