Kenyankronikals: My Grand Mother's Pumpkin Ice Cream

Boiled, sliced, orange Pumpkin

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.
So he put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well!

These lines, which will have my ultra feminist daughter up in arms, (wives aren't kept, they can well earn their own 'keep', thank you very much, I can hear her say), are from a book which was a childhood favourite: Illustrated Mother Goose, Nursery Rhymes. Outdated and outmoded the rhyme may well be, but whenever I gazed at the pumpkin in my refrigerator, it kept echoing through my mind...And stared at it I certainly did because it sat on a shelf in there for two whole weeks. My husband was on a business trip to Tanzania (he's back now so I can safely declare it in this post!), my daughter isn't home from college for her winter (Nairobi summer) break yet and so with just my son and me rattling around the house, cooking had been reduced to a bare minimum. The longer it sat there the more distasteful the idea of cooking it became. Being Indian, we have myriad ways of cooking pumpkin: a stir fried vegetable with peanut powder and spices, or steamed pumpkin with spiced curd or sweetened pumpkin mixed with whole wheat flour and deep fried...the list can run on, depending on which region of India you come from. None of these seemed very appealing and then I remembered my grandmother's pumpkin ice cream!
I was ten years old and we were living in Gauhati, Assam and my paternal grandmother was visiting us. My sister and I came home from school one day to find that a lovely surprise awaited us. A mellow yellow, tempting, home made ice cream! We immediately helped ourselves to bowlfuls of frozen gold, for that's exactly what it looked like. My grandmother asked us to guess the main ingredient, but try as we might, we just couldn't and had to finally, reluctantly, give up and ask her to disclose the answer. It was Pumpkin Ice Cream!
Since that day, until she passed away nearly a decade later, my grandmother often made this particular ice cream, especially when we had guests over for a meal. Our favourite game was asking people to hazard a guess about the core component! Believe me, few succeeded...
My grandmother belonged to that generation of ladies who never really needed a recipe to cook. They did everything off the top of their heads. And silly, foolish, immersed in academics me never bothered to ask her either...And so the recipe for the perfect pumpkin ice cream, instead of being passed on to me, passed away with my grandmother...
A couple of times in the past I did try to make pumpkin ice cream. But either I could clearly SEE pumpkin strands embedded in the ice cream or worse I could taste boiled pumpkin, which was not supposed to be the case at all...So I had given up.
This morning I did not have a very busy Skype class schedule and that pumpkin in the fridge was grating on my nerves, with its clearly printed super market price sticker. Pumpkins are expensive here! The Internet did not yield a satisfactory recipe because every American pumpkin ice cream recipe had cinnamon and other similar spices! We use cinnamon in our curries and biryanis, rarely in our desserts...I decided to make up a recipe as I went along..
So I asked my house help to skin the poor pumpkin and chop it up. She kept complaining how tough it had become...well, it had been aged to perfection! It was finally ready to be boiled, then pureed and mixed into the milky concoction. After simmering the whole mixture for quite a while and then cooling it, it was finally ready for freezing.

Bubbling merrily away in all its golden glory...

I wanted to play the guessing game with my son but I realized that I had given away the secret on the family WhatsApp group, which he read after coming home from school. I tend to forget he's on that group because he has only recently been allowed to use WhatsApp, albeit only from home.
Post dinner I scooped up some ice cream for myself in a glass bowl. It was amazing, though it still needed a bit more time to freeze firmly, but it certainly brought my grandmother and those long gone days to mind.. But my son was very skeptical and took just a spoonful of the ice cream to begin with. Needless to say, he LOVED it and came back with a huge bowlful. GenNext had become successfully addicted to this nutrient dense, rich ice cream.
My sister wanted the recipe immediately and I told her I planned to write up the story on my blog and would share the recipe there too. So here it is! I've never shared a recipe in the last six and a half years of blogging simply because there are people better qualified to do so out there but I really couldn't get anything good for the Indian version of this ice cream and so I modified my Kulfi recipe!

Ingredients
Whole Milk: 1 litre
Condensed Milk: 1 can
Saffron: A few strands
Cardamom: A few green pods
Pumpkin: 400 gms approximately.The bright orange one, skinned, deseeded, chopped, boiled and pureed finely, when cool.

Method
Boil the milk in a heavy bottomed pan and let it simmer for around thirty minutes. Add all the condensed milk, along with the saffron and cardamom and keep stirring. When the quantity reduces to three fourths of the original, add the pumpkin mix and keep stirring. Let it simmer for at least thirty to forty minutes more, until you actually see it becoming thicker and creamier.
Remove from flame and allow it to cool completely. Pour it into the vessel or box you want to freeze it in. After a few hours, take it out from the freezer, scoop it up and let the rich, smooth, creamy goodness trickle down your throat! There will be no ice crystals if you have done it right. And yes, allow folks to try it out and play the game with them! That's actually the icing on the cake... I mean the topping on the ice cream!