[Sca-cooks] Weird American food?

[Terry Decker]

<clipped>
> -pumpkin pie: I've had it, and it was yummy, but it's one of those sweet 
> vegetable things like chocolate and beetroot cake, that you don't see how 
> it ever occurred to anyone to try. Here pumpkin is pretty much only a 
> vegetable, for soup, pasta filling, or baked with a lamb roast. The only 
> sweet exception is the Queensland specialty, pumpkin scones.
>
> Margaret/Emma
> Melbourne, Australia/Krae Glas, Lochac

Purely as a guess, pumpkin pie began as an Elizabethean "thang" in the New 
World as a replacement for some of the pie stuffs the colonists had left 
behind.  While pumpkin and squashes in general are used in a variety of ways 
and pumpkin pie is available year round, most people in the U.S., when you 
say "pumpkin," relate it to the pumpkin pie served as a treat between 
Thanksgiving and New Year's Day.

Bear