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Baked Pumpkin
Cut the pumpkin in halves, then in quarters and remove the seeds, not the rind. Place in a baking-pan rind downwards, and bake in a slow oven until tender. Try it by piercing with a fork. When done, dish the pumpkin neatly on a pretty dish, moisten it with butter and serve. Help it by spoonfuls as mashed potatoes. In mid-winter, a nice sweet pumpkin baked and served is not only an attractive but a palatable dish, to my own taste far better than sweet potatoes.
A plain roast of pumpkin in its own skin, and one of the few nineteenth-century vegetable recipes that needs almost no translation. The only real variables are oven heat and the pumpkin itself.
- Oven temperatureA "slow oven" is 300-325F. At that heat a large wedge of pumpkin takes 60-90 minutes; a smaller sugar pumpkin, 45-60. Raising the heat to 400F will get you there faster but browns and dries the cut faces, which is not the effect intended here.
- Which pumpkinThe "nice sweet pumpkin" of the period means a dense field or pie pumpkin, not the thin-walled jack-o'-lantern sold for carving, which is watery and bland. Sugar Pie, Long Island Cheese or any winter squash sold for eating will behave as the book expects.
- Rind downwardsLeaving the rind on and setting it against the pan is the whole method: the skin acts as the cooking vessel and keeps the flesh from collapsing into the pan. Add a splash of water to the pan if your oven runs dry.
- Scraping and servingThe text directs you to dish the baked pieces neatly, moisten with butter and help it by spoonfuls, in the manner of mashed potato; spooning the flesh from the shell achieves the same end. Season with salt and pepper as well as butter -- the recipe calls for neither, and modern palates will find it under-seasoned.
- YieldNo quantity is given. A 3 lb sugar pumpkin, quartered, feeds four as a side dish; large field pumpkins go much further and the cooked flesh keeps three or four days refrigerated.
- If it comes out wetSome varieties give off a lot of liquid. Return the drained flesh to a dry pan over moderate heat for a few minutes before buttering, or the dish will pool on the plate.
Pumpkins and other native squashes were among the first American foods adopted by European settlers, and by the nineteenth century they were so ordinary in the northern states that cookbooks most often treated them as pie filling. What is notable here is the author's insistence on the pumpkin as a plain vegetable, served in spoonfuls like mashed potato, and the closing comparison with sweet potatoes. The reference to "mid-winter" is the practical point: a sound winter squash stores for months in a cool cellar without canning or drying, which made it one of the few fresh-tasting vegetables available in January before commercial refrigeration and rail shipping changed what a February table could hold.