The Elusive…Pumpkin

A few years ago, in November, we found ourselves in Vienna. It was a weeklong birthday treat, with lots of plans to visit galleries and operas and see old buildings and statues of Mozart.

We hadn’t thought of it as a foodie vacation, but between the street sausages and the pretzel breads and the beers and the great wines, the wonderful restaurant with the tea carts, the pastries and coffees, the wiener schnitzel, well, we were very very happy. And very very well fed.

One of the best things we did was stumble upon an open-air market, which we stupidly did not photograph. There, we saw the whole pumpkins that had been featured in meal after meal. It was fall, after all, so we’d been getting salads with pumpkin seeds and pastas with pumpkin seed oils…Pumpkin here, pumpkin there, pumpkin pumpkin everywhere.

And not the big white seeds, no! These pumpkin seeds were small and black. The pumpkins we saw at the market were also different. These were not oversized jack-o-lantern orange monstrosities. These were small, dense, orange with a gray cast…

We’ve never seen them before, and have never seen them since. 

Our supplies of pumpkin seeds and oils from that trip are long gone. So we’ve been trying to find out more about these elusive pumpkins. This weekend, at the Irvine Farmers Market, we asked the squash farmer about it. “Ugh, no idea,” he said.

And checking out websites for heirloom seeds also didn’t help.

Today, we had lunch with a friend who has friends in Germany and Austria. Help us, we begged.

She inquired, and apparently we are trying to find Gleisdorf pumpkins, which grow in Austria’s Steiermark. However, all we can find online at gourmet stores are the oils and dried seeds. We’d like to find seeds to plant, but when we investigate further, we find German-language agricultural articles.

We are not giving up! But if anyone has any ideas how to grow such a pumpkin here in the U.S.A, let us know!