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Pumpkin Pie
1/2 pint (1 cup) stewed pumpkin 1/4 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 4 heaping tablespoonfuls (4 1 teaspoonful lemon extract ozs.) sugar 2 eggs ½ teaspoonful powdered ginger 1 tablespoonful cornstarch 1/2 pint (I cup) cream 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter ½ teaspoonful powdered cinnamon Line an earthenware pie-plate with pastry. Moisten the cornstarch with three tablespoonfuls of the cream. Bring the rest of the cream to boiling point, stir in the cornstarch, and continue stirring until thickened. Remove from the fire, add the eggs well beaten and all the other ingredients. Turn into the prepared pieplate and bake in a moderate oven for about one hour.
A custard pie thickened with both eggs and cornstarch, which makes it more forgiving than the usual all-egg version. The ingredient quantities are set out in two columns in the original and should be read as a list, not as pairs.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F; the recipe itself gives no figure. An hour at that heat suits a deep earthenware plate, which holds heat slowly; in a thin metal tin the filling is likely to set sooner.
- Stewed pumpkinThis means pumpkin cooked until soft and mashed or sieved, not spiced canned pie filling. Plain canned pumpkin puree is the direct equivalent. If cooking your own, drain it well in a sieve or the custard will weep.
- The cornstarch slurryMoisten the starch with cold cream before it meets the hot cream, or it will lump. Once combined, keep stirring over heat until it visibly thickens, then take it off before adding the beaten eggs so they do not scramble.
- Ambiguous spice quantitiesThe ginger and cinnamon are both printed as "1½ teaspoonful," which may be a mangled half-teaspoon. A half teaspoon each of ginger and cinnamon suits one cup of pumpkin; a teaspoon and a half of each would be heavy against so little pumpkin.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon is a large amount by modern taste. Half a teaspoon, or the grated zest of half a lemon, reads better today.
- The pastry baseA wet custard on raw pastry gives a soggy floor. Blind-bake the shell at 400F for 12-15 minutes and let it cool slightly before filling.
- Judging donenessThe centre should still wobble as a single mass when the plate is nudged; a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean. A filling baked until firm in the middle will crack as it cools.
- YieldEnough for one 8- or 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Serve at room temperature or cold, never hot from the oven, as the custard needs several hours to finish setting.
Pumpkin baked in a crust is an old English-American sweet dish, appearing in seventeenth-century English cookery as "pompion pie" before it became fixed to the New England autumn table. What marks this version as a turn-of-the-century one is the cornstarch: a cheap, reliable thickener that is generally said to have spread through domestic cookbooks in the late nineteenth century and let a cook stretch the eggs, insure against a curdled custard, and get a sliceable wedge every time. The recipe calls for lining an earthenware pie-plate, and heavy glazed clay does bake a custard more gently and evenly than tin and can go from oven to table.