If you missed it, you should spend a few minutes reading this beautiful piece by Christopher Solomon (contributing editor at Outside magazine) that ran in the New York Times last month. It’s a meditation on the nagging worry of the impending winter and what it will bring this year.
He writes with a lilting, melodic style that brings you right into his moment, even if you’ve never been there yourself. Sentences like: “October’s yellow afternoons smell of winter at the edges. The soft ovation of the cottonwoods sends another round of leaves adrift on the water.” or “We put our hands on the still-warm granite of the climbing pitch rather than cook down the applesauce. We take ridgeline hikes among larch the color of struck matches when we should be at the work desk. We run for hours through the mountains without thought of tomorrow’s soreness, or the firewood left uncut. We tear at the days immoderately, like animals, and we wolf them down, hoping to fill a hole we see yawning ahead.”
Further down in the article, he references a writer named Gretel Erlich. Unfamiliar with the name I naturally have to go research her (rather fascinating) life story. I find out that she’s written for everyone from Orion to National Geographic to The Atlantic; she’s written novels, memoirs, essays, and a children’s book! Damn girl! (Oh, and she’s been struck by lighting twice.)
I begin to read bits and pieces of her writing. I’m enthralled. I like that it isn’t melodramatic or hyberbolic or overly spiritual, but instead is made up mostly of quiet contemplation and observation, drawn out by living in wild, open places—like when she says, for example: “I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.” I keep reading, bookmarking the title of two of her books (The Solace of Open Spaces and Islands, The Universe, Home). When I uncover writing like this, I always want to talk about it—not in a “let’s explicate this, Literature 101-style” kind of way but more in a “spread the excitement” sort of way.
So I call someone who generally feels the same—my mother—and I feel once again my constant, never-ending gratitude for being the daughter of someone with whom I love to talk.
I read aloud these lines about the change in season:
“Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons. All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call ‘aware’—an almost untranslatable word meaning something like ‘beauty tinged with sadness.’”
How true is that? More than any other season, autumn is suffused with melancholy. In spring and summer, the world is either growing lushly or poised to grow. In winter, we’ve already adjusted to living amongst bare trees and a cold, frozen landscape.
But every autumn, again and again, we have to watch everything disappear. There’s probably something to be said about faith here too—something about blindly believing that things will flourish again.
What better way to deal with that aching awareness than with cake? Okay, I kid, but seriously, I do think there’s value in leaning into what we look forward to about cold weather instead of dreading it. And leaning into autumn means embracing fall baking and spices and pumpkin and all of that. So, without further ado, an extra-spicy pumpkin bread.
(If you’re looking for more pumpkin breads, here’s the simplest oil-based one, a double chocolate one, a salty-sweet one with boiled cider and lemon zest, and a sourdough one.)
Today’s recipe uses a combination of oil and butter (I use vegetable oil but you could try olive oil or even coconut oil I’m sure). It calls for all brown sugar, instead of a mix of brown and white, and it has a bit of black pepper to give it some extra kick. It’s not so peppery that a little kid wouldn’t like it, but it does help to enhance the other spices.
You could absolutely use other kinds of pepper—try white peppercorns or pink peppercorns.
*This is neither here nor there, but let’s be clear, this is called bread but it is most certainly cake.
**I call for a full cup of brown sugar, but I often do slightly less than that—more like 200 grams—because I prefer to add TONS of sugar on top, as I like when it gets a nice crust, and I don’t want it the bread to be too sweet overall. But do it however you like, just keep in mind that you want to balance the sugar in the bread with the sugar on top.
Extra-Spicy Pumpkin Bread
Makes one 9” loaf
1/2 cup (113g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup (213g) brown sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups (210g) all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cinnamon (Vietnamese if you can find it)
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cardamom
1 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 cup (227g) pumpkin puree
2 tablespoons (or more) turbinado/raw sugar
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease a 9” x 5” loaf pan.
Beat the butter with the sugar until fluffy, about 3 minutes on medium-high speed in a stand mixer.
Add the oil and beat to combine.
Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well between each addition.
Add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, ginger, and black pepper. Mix until just combined, then add the pumpkin and continue mixing until the batter is smooth and no dry streaks remain.
Scrape the batter into your prepared pan and top generously with a layer of the raw sugar.
Bake for about 1 hour—start checking just before this, and remove it from the oven when a tester inserted into the center comes out without any wet batter clinging to it. The top might still feel slightly soft but that’s good—you don’t want to overbake it.
Remove from the oven and let cool in the pan fully, or flip it out onto a wire rack after 10 or 15 minutes and let it finish cooling there. Freezes beautifully!