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Pumpkin Pie (E Pare and cut the pumpkin)
e Pare and cut the pumpkin in pieces one inch square; put them in a stewing-pan with just enough water to keep the pumpkin from burning. Cover and stew slowly about a half hour or until tender. By this time the water should have entirely evaporated. If it has not, however, lift the lid of the kettle and allow it to evaporate. Press the pumpkin through a colander and add while hot a piece of butter the size of a walnut to each pint of pumpkin. When the pumpkin is cold, add a quarter of a teaspoonful of salt, one pint of milk, a half teaspoonful of ground mace, half a teaspoonful of ground cloves, one teaspoonful of ground ginger. Mix all well together, and add a half cup of sugar. Beat four eggs till light, stir them into the mixture, and stand aside about thirty minutes. Remember these quantities are added to one pint of pumpkin. Line four deep pie plates with good, plain paste. Fill them with the mixture, and bake in a quick oven about thirty-five minutes. If you use liquor, one gill of brandy may be added to the recipe given.
A straight custard pie built from scratch-cooked pumpkin rather than a can. The proportions are given per pint of pumpkin purée, which is the key to reading the rest.
- Read the quantities as a ratioEverything after the colander step — the milk, eggs, sugar, spices — belongs to one pint of purée, as the recipe itself pauses to remind you. Double the pumpkin and you double all of it.
- The pumpkin to buyUse a sugar or pie pumpkin, or any dense winter squash; a carving pumpkin is watery and bland. Something on the order of 2 lb of raw flesh will cook down to about a pint of purée, though yields vary with the squash. A 15-oz can of unsweetened pumpkin is close to a pint if you are skipping the stewing.
- Dry purée mattersThe instruction to let the water evaporate is the hinge of the recipe. Wet pumpkin makes a custard that weeps and a crust that never sets. Stew uncovered at the end until the mass mounds on the spoon.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 2 level tablespoons, or 1 oz. Stirred into hot purée it melts in evenly; added cold it stays in streaks.
- A gill of brandyHalf a cup — a generous amount for this quantity of filling, and it will loosen the custard. A quarter cup is closer to modern taste if you want the flavour without the slump.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no number; a "quick oven" is generally reckoned at somewhere around 400–425F. Thirty-five minutes at that heat risks curdling a milk-and-egg custard at the edge before the centre sets, so a common modern approach is to start hot for about 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F until done.
- Judging donenessThe filling should be set to within about two inches of the centre and still wobble slightly there; an instant-read thermometer shows 175F. It firms as it cools.
- Yield and depthOne pint of pumpkin with a pint of milk and four eggs is a thin, soft filling stretched over four plates. Two 9-inch pies give a more familiar slice, with a correspondingly longer bake.
- The spicingMace, cloves and ginger, no cinnamon — noticeably sharper and more perfumed than the modern blend. Half a teaspoon of ground cloves is assertive; taste the cold purée before the eggs go in if you want to scale it back.
Pumpkin pie has a long history in American cookery, descended from seventeenth-century English "pompion" pies in which the squash was sometimes fried in slices between layers of pastry rather than smoothed into a custard. By the nineteenth century the custard version had become fixed as New England holiday food, and cookbooks often printed several variants side by side. The closing line about brandy offers the liquor without assuming it, a common courtesy in books written for both drinking and temperance households.