It’s July 31st and we’re celebrating with some delicious pumpkin pasties! I can tell you, they were perfect. Flaky, buttery, with just the right amount of filling and spice. The recipe is at the end of the post, but you might be interested in the story behind them!

The chef’s name is Melody Edwards. At the time she created these stupendous goodies, Melody was a senior at Princeton University. Her final semester, she was enrolled in a “Literature, Food, and the American Racial Diet” course. The goal of the course was to explore – through novels and cinema – how food and taste informs race, nationhood, gender, family, and class.

One assignment was to bring to class “1. A dish based on a “literary” recipe. This can be a recipe found in or mentioned by a novel or by a literary figure or belonging to a particular historical period; Or, 2. A dish from your childhood.”

At least that’s how the assignment started. Over the course of the semester it morphed into a full-on cook-off that allowed student chefs to interpret the course “historically, archivally, contemporarily, globally, and more.” There’s an interesting article about it here.

Team Wingardium Leviosa (which consisted of Melody, Samantha Essig and Daniel Ling) decided to make pumpkin pasties. You’ll find their awesome academic analysis of the pasties here.

Melody graduated from Princeton last May and is headed to the The Institute of Culinary Education (a.k.a. ICE) in NYC. It’s no surprise. Her pumpkin pasties, which she adapted from several recipes, were AMAZING. Especially when you consider that she was working in a very hot, very small, dorm kitchen. Let’s take one more look at them.

Mmmmmm…nom nom nom. Here’s the recipe! I’ll leave you with a sweet quote from Melody about her connection to the Harry Potter series:

Perhaps I was an anomaly of the Harry Potter Generation, but when I was first reading the books, I did not look forward to the confrontations with Voldemort. I did not drag my parents to the bookstore before the sun was up for the dark, action-filled scenes that always came at the end of Rowling’s books. Rather, I relished the most mundane passages. Nothing brought me more joy than learning how wizards celebrated the holidays or reading intricate descriptions of breakfast in the Great Hall. While this reveals that I’ve been obsessed with food for my whole life, it also speaks to Rowling’s gift for creating a fully fleshed-out world for our delectation.

Happy Birthday Harry!