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Pumpkin Pie (Eggless)
Cook pumpkin or squash tender. Rub through a fine sieve and measure off 3 cups. Over it grate half a nutmeg or its equivalent of orange peel. Add 1½ cups white coffee sugar. Moisten 4 heaping teaspoons cornstarch in½ cup sweet milk and add to the pumpkin. Melt 1 tablespoon of butter, add a little salt and stir into the pumpkin. Now add 3 full pints of sweet milk. Stir well and pour the mixture into crusts. Bake in a hot oven until slightly browned on top. When cold, spread the top of one or two with tart jelly, and note the improvement. The custard in these pies will not leave the crust at the edge, nor will any water gather on top when allowed to stand a few hours, as is often the case with those made in the usual manner with eggs. 1 egg
An eggless custard pie thickened with cornstarch, scaled for a household baking several pies at once. The proportions are generous with liquid, so the key is baking long enough for the starch to set.
- YieldThree cups of pumpkin plus about 6½ cups of milk (three pints, plus the ½ cup used for the slurry) makes something near three quarts of filling — enough for three or four 9-inch pies. Halve or quarter the recipe if you want one.
- That stray "1 egg"The line at the end is a printer's orphan, almost certainly the tail of a neighbouring recipe. Ignore it; the entire point of this pie is that it contains no egg.
- White coffee sugarA coarse-crystal granulated sugar sold for sweetening coffee. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, measure for measure.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk that older recipes call for by name. Whole milk gives the best body here, since there are no eggs and no cream.
- Hot ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 425F, though the book gives no figures. Starting hot to set the crust and then dropping to a moderate oven to finish is a sensible modern approach, since the top will brown well before the centre thickens; judge by the recipe's own cue of slight browning plus a set centre rather than by the clock.
- The hinge: bake until the starch has actually gelatinizedCornstarch begins to thicken from around 150–160F and needs sustained heat beyond that to set properly. A jiggle at the very centre is fine, but a filling that still sloshes is undercooked and will weep no matter what the recipe promises. Four heaping teaspoons is a light hand for this much milk; expect a soft, sliceable custard rather than a firm one.
- Mixing the slurryMoisten the cornstarch in cold milk and stir it smooth before it goes into the warm pumpkin, and add the bulk of the milk gradually. Lumps of dry starch will not dissolve later.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to about 2 to 3 teaspoons, so half is roughly a teaspoon and a half — assertive but not wrong for three quarts of filling. Grate it fresh; pre-ground has little of the point.
- The jelly topSpread the tart jelly only after the pies are fully cold, and warm it slightly so it spreads without tearing the skin of the custard. Currant or crabapple jelly suits it.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to sell its flour, and it collected recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — which is why the tone here is a cook arguing a case rather than an editor issuing instructions. Eggless baking of this kind belongs to a long tradition of thrift rather than to any single shortage: eggs were seasonal and expensive in late winter, and cornstarch, widely available from the 1850s onward, gave cooks a cheap and reliable substitute thickener. What is unusual is that the writer treats the eggless version as an improvement rather than a compromise, and the writer is not wrong about the mechanism: egg custards set by protein coagulation will curdle and weep if overbaked, while a starch-set filling holds its water far more forgivingly. Pumpkin and winter squash are used interchangeably in the recipe, as they were in other North American pie recipes of the period, where "pumpkin" described a use more than a species.