Pumpkin Pie
Line pie plate with Plain Paste. For filling, mix one and one half cups stewed and strained pumpkin, one and one half cups milk, one egg, three fourths cup brown sugar, one tablespoon butter, one half teaspoon each, of salt and ginger, and one teaspoon cinnamon.
A plain New England custard-style pumpkin pie with no top crust and no spice blend beyond ginger and cinnamon. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to bake a custard pie, so the details worth filling in are temperature, timing and the unusually lean egg count.
- The hinge: egg to liquid ratioOne egg for three cups of pumpkin and milk is very light by modern standards, where two to three eggs per pie is normal. Expect a soft, spoonable set rather than a sliceable wedge; add a second egg if you want clean slices.
- Stewed and strained pumpkinThis means cooked pumpkin flesh pressed through a sieve, which is close to what canned pumpkin puree is. One and one half cups is most of a 15 oz can, which holds roughly one and three quarter cups. If you cook your own, drain it well, since watery puree is the main cause of a weeping filling.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F for 30 to 40 minutes. A cooler start leaves a soggy bottom; a hot oven all the way curdles the custard.
- Testing for doneThe filling should be set at the rim with a two-inch circle in the centre that still trembles when the pan is nudged. It finishes setting as it cools. A knife inserted at the edge comes out clean well before the centre does.
- Plain PasteLowney's own plain pastry, given elsewhere in the book. Any modern all-butter or shortening single-crust dough works. Chill the lined plate before filling and consider a partial blind bake, which the original does not mention.
- The butterMelt the tablespoon of butter before mixing so it disperses instead of floating in flecks. Cool it slightly so it does not scramble the egg.
- Yield and panThe mixture makes something over three cups of filling, which suits a standard 9-inch pie plate; fill to just below the rim and hold back any excess rather than overfilling. Serves six to eight.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt reads high but is right for three cups of custard. There is no nutmeg, clove or allspice here; the flavour is deliberately plain, and adding a pinch of nutmeg is a departure rather than a correction.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — one of a large family of cookbooks issued by food companies in the early twentieth century to put their product in domestic kitchens. Its chocolate chapters are the sales pitch; the rest is a competent general household cookbook, which is why a pumpkin pie with no chocolate in it sits in the Desserts section. The pie itself is an old New England form: pumpkin was a subsistence crop in the colonial Northeast, and baking the sieved flesh into a spiced milk-and-egg custard in a pastry shell is documented in American cookbooks from Amelia Simmons's American Cookery of 1796 onward. The spicing here is restrained, ginger and cinnamon only, where early American recipes, Simmons's included, commonly call for mace, nutmeg and allspice; the heavier mixtures most cooks now expect are often said to have been encouraged by the canned pumpkin and pre-mixed pie spice trade.