Home › Pastry and Puddings › Plain Pumpkin Pie
Plain Pumpkin Pie
Cut the pumpkin in pieces of convenient size to handle. Grate with a common grater, and add milk enough to make it a little thinner than common stewed pumpkin. To enough pumpkin for three pies, add one egg. Season with cinnamon. Bake a little longer than if the pumpkin was stewed. Potato Pie. Take one cupful of mashed potatoes, one cupful sugar, half a cupful of butter, half a cupful of sweet cream, two eggs, flavor to the taste with nutmeg. Bake in an under crust.
VI. Tarts and Tart-Crusts.
Two pies have run together in the typesetting here: a grated-raw-pumpkin pie and a mashed-potato pie, with the heading for the next section trailing after. Both are workable, but the pumpkin recipe assumes a great deal of knowledge on the cook's part.
- The hinge: raw pumpkin, not stewedThe whole point of this version is that the pumpkin goes into the shell uncooked and grated, so it cooks in the custard. That is why the instruction says to bake longer. The recipe specifies only 'a common grater'; too coarse a grate risks the filling still being stringy and watery by the time the custard has set.
- No sugar is listedThe pumpkin pie gives no sweetening at all. Whether that is a printer's omission or an assumption that the cook would supply it cannot be told from the text. Reckon on roughly half to three-quarters of a cup of sugar per pie, tasted into the milk before it meets the pumpkin.
- Very few eggsOne egg for three pies is far leaner than any modern pumpkin custard, which typically uses two eggs per single pie. Expect a soft, milky, almost pudding-like set rather than a sliceable custard; if you want a firm wedge, more egg is needed.
- "A little thinner than common stewed pumpkin"Thinner than a stewed pumpkin purée, so roughly a thick pouring consistency. The recipe gives no further guide.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Start at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F and bake until the centre barely trembles; as the recipe itself says, raw pumpkin needs a longer bake than a stewed filling.
- Which pumpkinField pumpkins of the period were denser and less watery than the jack-o'-lantern squash sold for carving today. Use a sugar or pie pumpkin, or a butternut, and grate rather than use a processor, which shreds too wet. The recipe specifies only 'a common grater'.
- Sweet creamIn the potato pie, "sweet cream" simply means fresh unsoured cream, as distinct from the sour cream many households kept on hand. Ordinary heavy or single cream is right.
- "Bake in an under crust"A single bottom crust only, no lid. The potato pie makes enough for one modest shell; the pumpkin recipe gives no quantities beyond a ratio — one egg to enough pumpkin for three pies — so it will need scaling.
Grated raw pumpkin pie is the fast, thrifty cousin of the stewed-and-strained version long standard in American cookbooks. Stewing pumpkin meant tending a pot and then pressing it through a sieve or colander; grating shifted the labour to a few minutes at the board and let the oven do the rest, at the cost of a longer bake and a coarser texture. Recipes of this type are often described as "plain" or "common," as against the richer versions built on cream, several eggs and a mix of spices. The potato pie tacked on beneath belongs to the same family of sweet root-vegetable custards etter-known relative is sweet potato pie, but plain white potato versions were also made, the mash serving as body and the nutmeg and butter doing the work of flavour.