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PUMPKIN PIE (a Cornish recipe)
Take a ripe pumpkin, and chip off the rind or skin; halve it, and take out the seed and puffy part in the centre, which throw away. Cut the flesh into small thin slices; fill a pie-dish therewith; add to it half a tea-spoonful of pimento, and a table-spoonful of sugar, with a small quantity of water. Cover with a nice light paste, and bake in the ordinary way. Pumpkin pie is greatly improved by being eaten with clotted cream and sugar. An equal quantity of apples with the pumpkin will make a still more delicious pie.
This is a sliced-fruit pie under a single top crust, not the custard-style pumpkin pie of American tradition. Treat it as you would a plate apple pie, with the one difference that pumpkin holds far more water than apple.
- Pimento means allspiceIn British cookery books of this period "pimento" is the dried allspice berry, not the sweet red pimiento pepper. Half a teaspoon of ground allspice for a pie-dish is about right; whole berries would need to be crushed.
- Choose a dense pumpkinField pumpkins bred for carving are watery and bland. Use a crown prince, kabocha, or any dense orange-fleshed winter squash, and the slices will hold their shape instead of collapsing into liquid.
- Slice thin and mean itPumpkin softens more slowly than apple, and there is no pre-cooking here. Slices of 3-4 mm will be tender by the time the crust colours; thicker pieces leave the filling raw under a finished top.
- "A small quantity of water"Two or three tablespoons is plenty. Pumpkin releases a great deal of its own juice, and the pie has no bottom crust to soak up more, so err low.
- Bake in the ordinary wayThe original gives no oven temperature or time. For a covered pie of this sort a modern oven at 425F for the first 15 minutes will set and colour the pastry; then drop to 350F for a further 35-45 minutes, until a skewer slides through the filling without resistance.
- Sugar to tasteA single tablespoon reads as very restrained now, and it made sense when the pie was finished with sweetened cream at the table. If you are serving it plain, three or four tablespoons suits modern palates better, more if the squash is bland.
- The apple versionThe suggested half-and-half mixture is the better pie. Use a cooking apple that breaks down, such as Bramley, and the pulp binds the pumpkin slices into a filling that will not run when cut.
- YieldA standard 9-inch pie-dish takes roughly 1.5 lb of prepared pumpkin flesh and serves six.
Cassell's flags this as Cornish, and the tell is the clotted cream rather than the pumpkin: a pie eaten with thick scalded cream and a dusting of sugar is squarely West Country practice, the same treatment given to apple pie and to the region's covered fruit tarts. Pumpkins and other winter squashes had long been grown in English gardens, and they kept well through the winter in a cool outhouse. The dish belongs to the older English tradition of the pumpkin or "pompion" pie as a sliced-fruit pie under pastry, seasoned with a warm spice and often mixed with apple; the custard version thickened with eggs and milk, which became the American standard, was already in print in the United States by the end of the eighteenth century. The instruction to add "an equal quantity of apples" reads as an acknowledgement that the pumpkin brings bulk and colour while the apple brings the flavour.