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Pumpkin Butter
Take the seeds out of one pumpkin, cut in small pieces and boil soft; take three other pumpkins, cut them in pieces and boil them soft, put them in a coarse bag and press out juice; add juice to first pumpkin, and let boil ten hours or more, to become of the thickness of butter; stir often. If the pumpkins are frozen, the juice will come out much easier.
A sugarless fruit butter that gets all its sweetness and body from evaporation. Four pumpkins reduce to a few jars, and the whole success of it rests on driving off water without scorching the bottom.
- The hinge: low heat, wide pan, constant attentionWith no sugar to protect it and a starchy purée that settles, this catches and burns the moment the heat is more than gentle. A wide, heavy pan gives more evaporating surface and shortens the ten hours considerably; a slow cooker with the lid propped open, or a 250-275F oven with the pot uncovered and stirred every half hour, does the same work unattended.
- Which pumpkinsField pumpkins of the carving sort are watery and bland. Cheese pumpkins, long-neck varieties, or ordinary winter squash such as butternut give more flavour per pound and less liquid to boil away. There is no knowing what size 'four pumpkins' meant in 1877; work by volume instead, and expect something in the order of a pint of finished butter from every 8-10 lb of raw flesh, though the yield varies widely with the squash.
- The coarse bagA jelly bag, a doubled square of cheesecloth, or a clean pillowcase. Pressing raw or lightly cooked pumpkin gives very little juice by hand; a potato ricer or a fruit press earns its keep here, and the pressed pulp can go into the pot as well rather than being wasted.
- Why freezing helpsThe instruction is sound. Ice crystals rupture the cell walls, so thawed pumpkin gives up its liquid far more readily than fresh. A night in the freezer, cut in chunks, then thawed in a colander, does most of the pressing for you.
- No sugar, no spice, no acidThis is a plain reduction, and it tastes like it: dense, faintly sweet, vegetal. The recipe says nothing about how it was served, though a butter of this thickness would presumably have gone on bread as apple butter did. Cider or cider vinegar, cinnamon, ginger and cloves are common additions if the flat sweetness needs lifting.
- When it is doneJudge by a spoonful on a cold plate. If liquid weeps out around the edge it needs more time; when the mound holds its shape and a spoon drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that closes slowly, it is at butter thickness.
- StorageKeep it refrigerated for a week or two, or freeze it in small containers. Pumpkin butter is low in acid and dense enough to insulate its own centre, so it should not be water-bath canned; current guidance is that pumpkin purées and butters are not safely home canned by any method.
Fruit butters are the thrifty end of the preserving shelf: long boiling rather than sugar does the concentrating, which mattered in a farm household where sugar was bought and firewood was not. Ohio and Pennsylvania kitchens made apple butter by the barrel in outdoor copper kettles stirred all day with a long wooden paddle, and pumpkin butter is the same technique turned on a crop that grew between the corn rows and had to be used before it rotted. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Marysville, Ohio, and published in 1877, is a collection of exactly this sort of contributed household economy, where a recipe's virtue is that it converts a glut into something that keeps. The pumpkin's own juice, boiled down for ten hours, is the only sweetener in it; sugar-free fruit butters of this kind are often said to have been common when sweetening meant molasses or maple, and they seem to have faded once cheap refined sugar and reliable canning made quicker preserves possible.