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EGGLESS SQUASH OR PUMPKIN PIE
Stew the squash or pumpkin till very dry, and press through a colander; to each pint of this is allow one tablespoon butter, beat in while warm one cup brown sugar or molasses; a little salt, one table-spoon cinnamon, one tea-spoon ginger, and one half teaspoon soda; a little allspice may be added, but it darkens the pies; roll a few crackers very fine, and add a handful to the batter, or thicken with two tablespoons flour or one of corn starch. As the thickening property of pumpkin varies, some judgment must be used in adding milk.
A depression-era style filling in all but date: no eggs, so the set comes from starch and a very dry purée rather than custard. The original assumes you know how to line and bake a pie shell, and gives no oven temperature at all.
- Dryness is the hingeWith no eggs to coagulate, the only thing standing between you and a soupy pie is evaporation. Stew the squash uncovered until it mounds on the spoon and no water weeps out, then press it through the colander or a sieve. Canned pumpkin purée works but is wetter than it looks; dry it in a wide pan over low heat first.
- A pint of puréeA pint is two cups. A standard 15-oz can of pumpkin is a little under that to start with, and less again once you have cooked water out of it, so you may need more than one can. A pint fills one 9-inch shell, serving six to eight.
- The milk is left to you, deliberatelyThe recipe declines to specify, and that is honest rather than careless — squash varies enormously in moisture. Add milk a few tablespoons at a time until the batter pours thickly, like a heavy pancake batter; about half a cup is typical, but go by the spoon, not the cup.
- OvenNone is given. 350°F for 45 to 55 minutes suits an eggless filling; the centre should be set with only a slight wobble. Starting hotter, around 425°F for the first 10 minutes, helps set the bottom crust if you are not blind-baking.
- The sodaHalf a teaspoon of soda here is not leavening in the usual sense; it neutralises acid in the molasses and darkens and softens the filling, much as it does in gingerbread. Brown sugar carries less acid than molasses, so the reaction will be slighter, though the recipe calls for the soda either way.
- Crackers as thickener"A few crackers" means plain soda or water crackers, not sweet ones; a handful of fine crumbs is about a third of a cup. The two tablespoons of flour or one of cornstarch are the cleaner-tasting substitutes and give a smoother set.
- Spicing is heavy by modern tasteA full tablespoon of cinnamon to a pint of purée is roughly three times what most current recipes use. Halve it on a first attempt if you want the squash to show through, and take the note about allspice at face value — it does dull the colour.
- Squash choiceUse a dense winter squash — butternut, kabocha, Hubbard — not a summer squash or a carving pumpkin, both of which are watery and bland.
Eggless, milkless and butterless versions of standard recipes do turn up in nineteenth-century American cookbooks long before wartime rationing made them famous. Eggs were seasonal and expensive in an Ohio winter, hens laying poorly in the cold months precisely when the stored squash and pumpkin were at their best, so a pie that got its body from starch and reduction instead of custard solved a real household problem. The instruction that "some judgment must be used" is characteristic of the book and of the period: readers were expected to have cooked squash before and to know what a batter should look like, and the recipe declines to invent a number it cannot honestly give. Pumpkin and squash were treated as interchangeable here, as they largely still are in commercial canning.