With Thanksgiving coming up later this week in the United States, we thought this would be a good time to dip once again into the Draper employee cookbook.

Thanksgiving dinner is built on traditional cornerstones such as turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and pumpkin pie, but most families have their own special additions to the festive table. For our Thanksgiving recipe, we thought it would be nice to offer something that might be a new idea for you to consider: persimmon pudding. This recipe has been handed down through the generations at Draper, originating with Jessie Draper Pidgeon, who was the daughter of company founder Luther O. Draper.

We asked Draper President John Pidgeon to share some memories about this recipe:

Mike Broome, Draper’s Vice President of Manufacturing, and I have fond memories of harvesting persimmons for our grandmother, and of eating her delicious persimmon pudding every Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Her secret recipe appears below.

Mike and I would go to the persimmon grove behind our grandparents’ barn after the first hard frost, shake the trees and fill our buckets. We always filled our buckets to the top to insure our grandmother had enough pulp to make two large puddings, but the best persimmons never made it to the kitchen. Mike and I ate them in the grove.

And now, here’s the recipe!

Persimmon Pudding

• Ingredients:
• 2/3 cup sugar
• butter, the size of an egg
• 2 eggs
• 1 c. sour cream or buttermilk
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 3 c. flour
• 1 qt. ripe persimmons run through colander*

*A colander is kind of a bowl with holes in it, often used to drain pasta or rice. Here it is used to pulp the persimmons into a bowl.

Beat sugar and butter together. Add eggs, sour cream or buttermilk, baking powder, baking soda, and flour. Add persimmon pulp; mix. Bake about 60 minutes in a 350-degree oven in a greased 8 x 8 pan.