A fruity September

Summer is definitely winding down by the time September starts, but Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974) reassures us that some crops are still freshly coming into season. Peaches immediately catch my eye since we had peach trees at my childhood home. When we made "peach pudding," it meant that we'd thrown some home-frozen peaches into the blender and turned them into what would probably now be considered a smoothie. Blanchard's Frozen Peach Pudding is considerably more complicated (and probably more exciting).

Since it involves cutting a loaf cake into layers, it reminds me of the sandwich loaf recipes old cookbooks recommended for parties, but this one sounds a lot more palatable than most of them do. I mean, would you rather have layers of rum-and-ginger soaked cake with sliced peaches or white and wheat bread filled with a mixture of cottage cheese, potatoes, celery, and pineapple?

I always think of melons as more of a height-of-summer fruit, but they are listed in the September chapter. I was surprised to see a recipe for underripe melons, but Blanchard recommends turning them into a curry.

This doesn't specify the type of melon, so maybe it doesn't really matter if it's not ripe. It won't taste like a full-fledged melon anyway. In any case, this is recommended as "a spicy relish for plain meatloaf or chicken" (and reminds us that any added spice was all it took to get called "spicy" back in the day).

In addition to the peaches and melons, grapes are coming into season. (September is really the month for fruit!) While I've seen plenty of recipes for raisin pies, I don't usually see recipes for pies using the fresh counterpart.

Considering that you rarely find Concord grapes in the supermarket, I can see why this recipe would be reserved for home gardeners. (I'm sure that the inconvenience of having to separate the seeds, pulp, and skin also play a role in making Concord grapes an unpopular choice for home cooks.)

And honestly, September is already a pretty inconvenient month for families with anybody in school, so there's a good reason why people choose not to spend what little free time they have separating grapes into their various components or wrestling with underripe melons simply to make them taste like sautéed onions. The peaches, on the other hand... Maybe those would be worth the hassle at the end of a long, hectic week? (Who am I kidding? Throwing some frozen peaches straight into the blender is more my speed. But people in the '70s had way fewer devices beeping for their attention and way fewer choices in the grocery store that could taste just about as good as something homemade and be 100 times easier.)