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Hot Pumpkin Pie
Line pie tin with Crisco pastry. Mix two cups steamed and strained pumpkin, with 2 teaspoons Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon each cinnamon, cloves, mace, allspice, and ginger, grated rind of 1 lemon, 1 cup milk, 1/2 cup cream, 2 well beaten eggs, and pour into prepared pie plate. Bake till firm in moderate oven. Serve hot. As a change, place on the pumpkin pie as it comes out of the oven a layer of halved marshmallows, replace in the oven and let them brown.
A plain pumpkin custard from a Crisco promotional cookbook, written for cooks who already knew how pumpkin pie went together. Two things need attention before you start: there is no sugar in the list, and the oven is described rather than numbered.
- The missing sugarAs printed, this filling is unsweetened, and there is no salt either. Comparable pumpkin pies of the period generally carried somewhere around 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar (sometimes part brown sugar or molasses) and a little salt per two cups of pumpkin. Assume an omission rather than an intention.
- Moderate ovenThe term is conventionally read as somewhere between 350F and 375F. For a custard filling in a raw shell, one common modern approach is to start at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 350F for the remaining 30 to 40 minutes.
- Steamed and strained pumpkinThis means pumpkin cooked until soft and pushed through a sieve, not tinned pumpkin pie filling, which is already sweetened and spiced. Plain canned pumpkin purée substitutes directly, cup for cup; if you steam your own, drain it well or the filling will weep.
- Crisco pastryCrisco was new when this book was written and the point of the book was to sell it. Any all-shortening or shortening-and-butter pastry for a single 9-inch crust works. The 2 teaspoons of Crisco in the filling itself is negligible and can be left out.
- SpicingTwo and a half teaspoons of spice for one pie is assertive by modern standards, and mace plus allspice plus cloves is a heavier hand than most palates want now. Halving the cloves and mace gives a more familiar balance.
- "Bake till firm"Do not bake until the centre is solid. The pie is done when the outer two inches are set and the middle still shivers as a single mass; it firms as it cools. An instant-read thermometer in the centre should show about 175F.
- Serving hotA hot custard pie is soft and will not cut cleanly. Let it stand at least 20 minutes off the heat if you want tidy wedges, or serve it warm by the spoonful as intended.
- The marshmallow finishHalved marshmallows browned in the oven scorch quickly. Watch them under a broiler for a minute or two rather than returning the pie to the moderate oven, where the custard will overcook before the tops colour.
- YieldThe recipe does not state a tin size. The quantity of filling is generous for a single 9-inch shell and may want a deep plate or a little left over; six to eight servings.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a family of cookbooks published to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening Procter & Gamble brought out in 1911 — which is why the fat is named in every recipe and why two teaspoons of it turn up, somewhat pointlessly, in a pumpkin custard. The pie itself is much older: pumpkin and other winter squashes were baked in crusts in English and colonial American kitchens well before the nineteenth century, and by the 1910s the formula of sieved pumpkin, milk, eggs and a heavy hand of sweet spices was thoroughly standardised. What marks this version as of its moment is the marshmallow variation. Commercially manufactured marshmallows became cheap and widely available in the early twentieth century, and American cooks of the 1910s and 1920s put them on everything from sweet potatoes to fruit salads — a fashion that stuck to the Thanksgiving table and has never entirely left it.