Mystery Pie

I was standing in line at the school cafeteria, pushing a tray full of carbohydrates. It was Thanksgiving season, and through the cardboard cutouts of cornucopias I detected that there was just one choice for dessert. Kids were grabbing the plates as if under a blue-light special. I scrutinized the little paper plate with the orange concoction.

“It won’t bite you,” said the kid next to me to keep the line moving. I was looking around for a red Jell-O alternative. “C’mon Shorty, take it of leave it!” he snapped.

“It smells like spice cake,” I said to him with my nose in it, though he wasn’t interested in discussing the matter.
“She’s smelling the pie -- gross!” remarked someone else.
“She once licked her plate after spaghetti.”

They side-stepped me like I was toxic waste. I happened to think the school’s spaghetti and sauce entrée was quite delicious and took their comments in stride. I had eaten spice cake once at the school’s holiday carnival, but this stuff wiggled like pudding. The smooth and dense texture filled my mouth. The sweet fragrance of the custard sent waves of pleasure right down to my Buster Browns. I felt a bit naughty eating something that seemed so exotic.

When I came home that night and explained the details of the dessert to my mother she replied simply, “Oh that’s pumpkin pie.”

“How come we never have it?” I asked in utter amazement. “It’s really good!”
She looked at me as if I had just suggested that we start celebrating Christmas.
“My mother never served it.” She bit off every word. “NOT a very Jewish dish.” I had gotten the same comment once before, regarding spice cake.

I didn’t understand the explanation at the time. My mother was an atheist, and didn’t believe in the existence of a supreme being. But she was very devout in regard to tradition. She called herself a gastronomic Jew and thought that if a dish fell outside the parameters of traditional Jewish cuisine it wasn’t worth serving.
But it went deeper than that. To mother, Thanksgiving was an assimilated non-holiday. She celebrated the event with little enthusiasm knowing that those people weren’t her forefathers. There hadn’t been one Jewish Pilgrim at the original Thanksgiving table and she resented that! So, she held out on pumpkin pie for as long as she could. Now that the secret was out, she had no objection if I ate it -- she just wouldn’t bake it. From that year on, I had to purchase Entenmanns’s from the convenience store if I wanted pumpkin pie with Thanksgiving dinner.