The Merry Wives Of Muro: Pumpkins

"Peter, Peter pumpkin eater
Had a wife but couldn't keep her
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well."

The pumpkin shell, as with most of the pumpkin, can be eaten. It is not used solely to store wives nor to have a ghoulish face carved into it and to be made into a lantern. There are few more versatile vegetables than the pumpkin and no vegetable that is monikered with quite the same suggestion of humour.

"Pumpkin". It sounds daft, and the sound is sufficient to detract from its usefulness. Its comedic possibilities extend also to its inhabiting the end-of-the-pier, ooh-er-missus nudge-nudge alongside the marrow, especially when the pumpkin grows not in its more conventional round shape.

A friend of mine, a local journalist with the Spanish press, did a piece last year about a pumpkin grower from Pollensa who had cultivated a pumpkin that was over a metre in length and substantially engorged in its girth. The accompanying photo, fortunate or unfortunate, depending upon your prurience, showed the grower lying on top of the vegetable. I leave you to imagine exactly how this looked and where one end of the tuberous protuberance was located.

The pumpkin, butt of jokes or not, is celebrated locally. It has an autumn fair more or less in its honour. Muro's. Local restaurants prepare different pumpkin-based dishes and there is, inevitably, the how-big-is-your-pumpkin competition. Pity the poor and humble pumpkin, forever cast as the vegetabilist jester for whom size is all that matters.

In Muro and neighbouring Sa Pobla, the soil hennaed red with Saharan dust is the production line for cabbages, potatoes, pumpkins and other veg. Sa Pobla is undergoing a shift in its traditional produce allegiance, the more widespread cultivation of rice challenging the potato sufficiently for it to assume the place of honour at the head dining-table of the town's own autumn fair this year. Muro though maintains its idiosyncratic pumpkin roots, a mere un-sizeworthy three inches into the earth around the town at the commencement of the vegetable's growth.

The pumpkin is, however, a deceiving fellow. Its orangeness hints at something rather more succulent than it actually is. Like packaging elaborated to entice the consumer with a product that is no more superior to one without the benefit of a design consultant and budget, the pumpkin suggests more than it delivers - in its raw or basic state. It's what you can do with a pumpkin which is more rewarding than simply, say, tossing chunks of it into a pan of boiling water.

It has, for example, and thanks to its seeds, given the world the finest bread known to man. Pumpkin bread. "Kürbis-Brot" in German. As with their fabulously diverse beers, the Germans do things with bread unimaginable to those raised on a loaf of Mothers Pride or Spain's insanely named Bimbo. In Muro the pumpkin has been aligned with prawns, mixed with couscous, made into a pie with pork and parsley, combined with chocolate and mandarins and - naturally enough of course in the land of the ensaïmada - been added to the pastry.

In its honour and in honour of Muro's fair, time it was, thought I, to follow a recipe for a casserole with local sausage and pumpkin. Simple enough. To concoct that is. But in the greengrocery section of the local Eroski, at the time of the pumpkin fair, was there a pumpkin to be seen? There was not. All the pumpkins had gone. Where or where could my pumpkin be?

The answer was simple. All those Pedros, Pedros pumpkin eaters. They have made for their wives some seasonal shell suits. And now they are the merry wives of Muro, thanks to their Pedros, Pedros pumpkin eaters and how big that the pumpkins grow. Ooh-er, missus.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.