ROAST BUTTERNUT PUMPKIN TARTLETS
How much potential can one pumpkin offer? Altamiras came up with ingenious flavour combinations for a sequence of eight dishes built around their flesh: given as alms to the friars, pumpkin was clearly a larder basic.
Opening with a breakfast soup diluted with milk, broth and honey, he also suggested Lenten baked slices with lemon and olive oil, and fried wedges served with wine and cinnamon.
For an autumnal dessert pastry to serve at Casa Gerald Brenan I wanted to experiment with that compendium of flavours. Roasting an acorn pumpkin, skin-on, to a dryish pulp, I added his soup’s honey and some cream for a thick purée, poured it into small pastry boats brushed with egg white to keep them crispy, and then played with three or four toppings. Fresh goat’s milk cheese or kefir, whole pine kernels, finely chopped sunflower seeds and a ribbon of lemon verbena worked well, but for my own taste the best match was a sweet one: orange-flower honey, dried apricot sorbet and a few grains of crunchy pollen.
Shades of sweetness, rustic luxuries.
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❖ Roast Sweet Butternut Pumpkin Tartlets
Roast, cool and mash butternut pumpkin flesh with honey, kéfir or crême fraiche, lemon verbena and chopped nuts or caramel brittle as a filling for pastry tarts.
Roasting pumpkin, skin-on, gives a versatile dry pulp as good for making Juan Altamiras’s creamy breakfast soup as for filling tartlets.”