Pumpkin Pie
Stew pumpkin, cut into small pieces, in a half pint water; and, when soft, mash with potato-masher very fine, let the water dry away, watching closely to prevent burning or scorching; for each pie take one well-beaten egg, half cup sugar, two table-spoons pumpkin, half pint rich milk (a little cream will improve it), a little salt; stir well together, and season with cinnamon or nutmeg; bake with under crust in a hot oven. Some steam pumpkin instead of stewing it.-Mrs. A. B. Morey.
A thin, custard-heavy pie by modern standards, built one pie at a time rather than by the batch. The proportions are the thing to read carefully before you start.
- The pumpkin quantity is not a typo, but it is lowTwo tablespoons of very thick, dried-down purée to a cup of milk gives a pale, barely-flavored custard. Most cooks today use 1 to 1 1/4 cups purée per 9-inch pie; if you follow the original, expect something closer to a spiced milk custard tinted orange.
- Half pintOne cup, US measure. The half pint of water for stewing is also one cup, and it is meant to boil away entirely.
- Drying the purée is the hingeThe instruction to let the water dry away, watching closely, is what makes the filling set. Cook the mashed pumpkin over low heat, stirring, until it holds a mound on the spoon and no liquid weeps out. Wet purée gives a soupy, separated pie.
- A hot ovenRead as roughly 400-450F. Custard pies do best started hot to set the crust, then dropped to about 350F after 15 minutes and baked until the center is just barely wobbly, roughly 30 to 40 minutes more; around 175F internal is the usual test. None of the staging is in the original, which simply says 'hot oven'.
- Under crust onlyThis is an open pie with no lid and no lattice. Because a raw shell under a wet custard turns pale and soft, partially blind-bake the crust before filling.
- Pie pumpkins, not jack-o'-lanternsThe pumpkins of a 19th-century kitchen garden were likely drier and denser-fleshed than the large carving pumpkins now sold in autumn. Use a small sugar or pie pumpkin, or canned solid-pack puree, which is already cooked down.
- SeasoningThis recipe calls for cinnamon or nutmeg singly, though other period recipes combine several spices; the pre-mixed commercial 'pumpkin pie spice' is a 20th-century product. Start at half a teaspoon per pie.
- YieldAs written, one pie per egg. The quantities make only about a cup and a half of filling, which suits a small or shallow tin rather than a full-depth 9-inch one.
Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, published in Minneapolis and growing out of the Ohio-compiled Buckeye Cookbook of 1876, assembled from contributions by named housewives — Mrs. A. B. Morey here — which is why the same book can carry several different pumpkin pies with quite different proportions. Pumpkin pie in this period was closer to a custard tart than to the dense purée pie of the 20th century: the squash was a thickener and a flavoring as much as a bulk ingredient, and eggs and milk did the structural work. The habit of stewing and then drying the pumpkin persisted well into the era of canned goods; Libby's began packing canned pumpkin in 1929. The closing note that "some steam pumpkin instead of stewing it" is typical of the book's method — the community handing over its variations along with the rule.