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Pumpkin Pie
Stew, sift, add as much boiling milk as will make it about onethird thicker than for common pumpkin pie; sweeten with sugar or molasses, bake in [25] a hot oven.
Or add rolled cracker or flour to the sifted pumpkin; add milk to the thickness of common pumpkin pie. Squash and sweet-potato pies are made in the same way.
Peach Pie. Take small juicy peaches; fill the pie-dish: sprinkle sugar, a little flour, a tablespoonful of water; cover, and bake one hour.
Two terse nineteenth-century "receipts" rather than modern recipes: they assume you already know how to line a dish with pastry and judge a filling by eye. The instructions are workable, but several things go unsaid.
- The hinge: consistency, not a formulaBoth versions are described only in relation to "common pumpkin pie," which the original author expects you to know. The first version simply takes less boiling milk, so it ends up about a third thicker; the second is thinned to the usual consistency and set with cracker crumbs or flour. As a rough working gauge, a batter that pours but holds a line drawn through it will do.
- "A hot oven"In wood-stove language this is roughly 400-450F. Modern practice for a custard-style pumpkin pie is to start hot for about 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F; note that this filling has no egg, so the risk of curdling is less pressing.
- Stew and siftCut the pumpkin, steam or simmer until soft, then push through a sieve or food mill. This is a straining step, not a flour-sifting step, and it matters: unsifted pumpkin gives a stringy pie. Canned pumpkin purée substitutes directly, though its consistency will differ from your own stewed pumpkin and the milk may need adjusting.
- No eggs, no spiceNeither variant calls for egg, so the set comes from the thicker mixture or from the cracker and flour. Expect a denser, more pudding-like slice than the modern egg-custard pumpkin pie. The book also gives no spice; whether the compiler took spices for granted is not stated here.
- Rolled crackerPlain unsalted soda or water crackers crushed fine — about 1/3 cup of crumbs per pie is a reasonable starting point. Period 'common crackers' were hard and generally unsalted, so unsalted ones are the closer match.
- MolassesPeriod molasses was cane molasses of varying grades rather than the blackstrap sold today. Use unsulphured mild molasses; blackstrap will dominate the pumpkin entirely.
- The peach pieAn hour in a hot oven, with the dish filled with fruit and then "covered," i.e. given a top crust. "A little flour" is unquantified; a couple of tablespoons for a full dish is a reasonable guess, since juicy peaches throw a lot of liquid. The single tablespoon of water appears to be there only to get the fruit started.
- YieldNo quantities are given for either pie. As a working figure, about 2 cups of sifted purée will fill a standard modern 9-inch dish.
Pumpkin pie in this form is a New England inheritance: a stewed and sieved squash sweetened with whatever the house had, sugar or molasses, and baked in a pastry-lined dish. The note that "squash and sweet-potato pies are made in the same way" reflects how these recipes actually circulated: one method, applied to whatever root or gourd was in the cellar. The run-on into a peach pie at the end suggests two contributions set as one block of type, a common feature of compiled household books assembled from contributed receipts.