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Pumpkin Pie
Select a moderate sized pumpkin. Do not peel, as most of the sweet as well as color lies in the rind, Wash and cut into small pieces, after scraping out the stringy part. Put in a porcelain kettle with a pint of boiling water, and it will soon be covered with its own juices. It is necessary to evaporate these slowly, which will take six or eight hours. When the juice has nearly boiled off the pumpkin, lay a cloth in a colander, pour the pumpkin into it, fold the ends of the cloth over and place a plate and weights on same. Let drain in this way till morning.
To 4 cups of this strained pumpkin (measured after rubbing through a common flour sieve) add a teaspoon salt, 1 of mace, the same of nutmeg and a tablespoon of ginger or other desired flavoring. Add 4 eggs well beaten with 1½ cups of sugar. Now add slowly 4 cups of milk and a cup of rich cream. Taste the mixture, as some pumpkins require more sugar than others. This will make from 3 to 4 small pies. One moderate sized pumpkin will yield about 5 cups of strained pulp.
This is a from-scratch pumpkin custard that begins with a whole pumpkin and assumes you already know how to line a plate and bake a pie. The long reduction is the whole point of the method, and the missing oven instructions are the gap you have to fill.
- The hinge: drive off the waterFresh pumpkin is mostly water, and a wet purée makes a weeping, soupy custard. The six to eight hours of slow evaporation, followed by a night draining under a weighted plate, is what concentrates flavour and gives the filling body. Canned solid-pack pumpkin is already reduced to roughly this consistency, which is why it substitutes cup for cup.
- Porcelain kettleThat means an enamelled cast-iron or enamel-lined pot, not china. It matters because bare cast iron or unlined copper can discolour the pulp and give it a metallic edge over a long cooking. Any heavy non-reactive pan works.
- Leaving the rind onThe skin stays on only through the cooking; it is caught by the sieve when the pulp is rubbed through. If you are pushing the flesh through a food mill or fine sieve as directed, you can follow this. If you plan to use a blender or food processor, peel first, because the skin will not break down.
- Choosing the pumpkinA "moderate sized pumpkin" here means a dense cooking variety, not a carving pumpkin, which is watery and bland. Sugar pie, cheese or kabocha types give a thicker pulp and a much shorter reduction.
- The spicing is heavyA tablespoon of ginger plus a teaspoon each of mace and nutmeg across four pies is assertive by current taste, and a full teaspoon of ground mace is a lot of a strong spice. Halve the mace and nutmeg on a first attempt, and note there is no cinnamon at all, which is why this tastes older than a modern pumpkin pie.
- The custard ratioFour cups pulp, four eggs, four cups milk and a cup of cream is a slack, milky filling by modern standards, closer to a baked custard than a dense pie. Chill the shells well or blind-bake them partway, or the bottom crust is likely to go soggy.
- No oven directions givenThe book assumes the baker knows. Start at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F and bake until the centre reads 175F and still wobbles slightly as a single mass, usually 35-45 minutes more. Overbaking past about 185F is what cracks the surface.
- Yield"Three to four small pies" means shallow plates of smaller diameter than the modern standard. Two 9-inch deep-dish shells will take most of the filling; bake any surplus as custard cups in a water bath.
Five Roses, the flour brand behind this book, collected recipes from Canadian housewives, and this one carries the marks of a rural kitchen where the pumpkin came off the farm rather than out of a tin. The instruction to spend a full day reducing and draining pulp belongs to a period before canned solid-pack pumpkin was widely available and cheap; commercial canned pumpkin existed from the later nineteenth century but did not displace home preparation everywhere at once. The spicing is worth noticing: ginger, mace and nutmeg with no cinnamon at all, a profile closer to the seventeenth-century pumpkin pies and puddings thickened with eggs and cream than to anything later. The candid note to taste the mixture, because some pumpkins need more sugar than others, is the sort of instruction that vanishes once every cook is working from the same standardised can.