Bourbon Persimmon Pudding

So my pawpaw ice cream spent a long, tempting week in my freezer awaiting my monthly potluck club. I had a sneaking suspicion that pawpaws and persimmons were meant for each other, so I made my annual bourbon persimmon pudding to find out.

Persimmons grow wild in Southern Indiana and they have always had a special place in my heart. For me, persimmons are the harbingers of fall and one of the few fruits that I have never eaten out of season. And since gathering persimmons requires one very loving mother searching the ground up and down my family’s road and storing the persimmons for my next visit, they really are autumn treasures.

(For those of you without a country road of wild persimmons or a mother willing to hunt for them, I actually found persimmon pulp at Paul’s Fruit Market in Louisville and you can also use Hachiya persimmons, which can be found in many grocery stores.)

It’s best to clean and pulp the persimmons with a food mill when they’re fresh, but you can also freeze them until you’re ready. It takes about two cups of pulp for most recipes, although you can make whatever you have work. There are a thousand persimmon pudding recipes (I adapted one I found on chow.com), but the nature of a pudding is very forgiving so the flavors you use are more important than the exact measurements. And, aside from the food mill (which is helpful but not necessary), you don’t need any special equipment or techniques.

Just mix the ingredients together in one bowl and bake in a cake pan lined with parchment. People will tell you that it’s better than all the other baked goods you’ve made that actually required some baking savvy.

And now I can tell you without question that persimmon pudding was meant to be eaten with pawpaw ice cream.