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Squash Pie
2 cups stewed squash, 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 2/3 cup sugar; 1 teaspoon ginger, 2 eggs, and 2 cups milk. Beat eggs until light. Place squash in quart measure, add sugar, Crisco, salt, spice, and then beaten eggs. Stir well and add sufficient milk to make 1 quart of whole mass. Turn into pie tin lined with Crisco pastry and bake slowly for 45 minutes. When done a silver knife when inserted will come out from it clear. Squash pie will become watery if allowed to boil.
A custard pie built by volume rather than weight: the squash, sugar, fat, spice and eggs go into a quart measure and milk is added until the whole reaches a quart. A few notes make it behave in a modern oven.
- The hinge: do not let it boilThe last line is the whole technique. Once an egg custard reaches a simmer the proteins tighten and squeeze out water, and the filling turns grainy and weeps into the crust. Hold the oven low enough that the surface never bubbles, and pull the pie while the centre still trembles slightly.
- "Bake slowly"Period ranges for a slow oven vary, roughly 250-325F depending on the source; the book itself gives no temperature. Err toward the low end for a custard filling. Some modern bakers start a custard pie hotter for the first ten minutes to set the pastry.
- CriscoThis book was written to sell Crisco, and the shortening appears where an older recipe would say butter or lard. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and a tablespoon of melted butter in the filling is a straight substitution with better flavour.
- The squash"Stewed squash" means a dense winter squash, Hubbard among the varieties commonly used, cooked soft and mashed. Drain it well; watery squash is the other route to a weeping pie. Canned pumpkin puree is a workable stand-in at the same volume.
- The quart measureUse the vessel as instructed rather than measuring the milk separately. The point is a fixed total volume, so a wetter or drier squash self-corrects: you may need noticeably less than the 2 cups of milk named.
- DonenessThe clean-knife test still holds, but test an inch from the centre, not the middle. Any thin blade does the same job as the silver one specified.
- YieldOne quart of filling fills a single deep 9-inch shell, or a standard 9-inch with a little left over. Six to eight servings, and it cuts far more cleanly once fully cooled; refrigerate it rather than leaving it out.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, which explains why the fat is named as a brand in both the filling and the crust. The pie itself is much older than the shortening: squash pie was standard New England autumn baking well before pumpkin displaced it in the popular imagination, and nineteenth-century cookbooks often treat the two as interchangeable, with Hubbard and other hard winter squashes preferred for their drier, sweeter flesh. The dish is best understood not as a pastry but as a baked custard that happens to sit in a crust, which is why the author's warning against boiling comes last.