Squash Pie
Use Chopped Paste. For filling, mix one cup stewed and strained squash, one half cup sugar, one half teaspoon salt, two eggs, one half teaspoon cinnamon, one fourth teaspoon nutmeg, and one half cup milk.
A very good pie may be made by using one and one half cups of the squash left from dinner, sweetening and seasoning it without adding eggs.
A plain New England custard pie of the sort that predates the pumpkin-only convention. The original assumes you know how to bake a custard pie, so the two things it omits — oven heat and doneness — are the two worth spelling out.
- Chopped pasteA period term for a plain pastry in which cold fat is chopped into the flour with a knife rather than rubbed in by hand. Any standard single-crust pie dough behaves the same; you need enough for one 8- or 9-inch shell.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumed a range you judged by hand. Start at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 325-350F for 30 to 40 minutes.
- When it is doneThe custard should be set at the edge with a slight wobble in the centre; an instant-read thermometer in the middle reads about 175F. Baked until the middle is firm, it will crack and weep as it cools.
- Stewed and strained squashA dry-fleshed winter squash — Hubbard was the New England standard — steamed or boiled, then pushed through a sieve. Strain out as much water as you can; a wet purée gives a soupy filling that never firms up. Canned pumpkin purée is a fair stand-in by texture.
- The eggless versionThe second sentence is a leftovers pie, not a custard. Without eggs it sets only as far as the squash itself will hold, so expect something closer to a thick sweetened paste in a crust. Bake it in a hotter oven for less time and do not expect it to slice cleanly.
- QuantityOne cup of squash, half a cup of milk, half a cup of sugar and two eggs makes something over two cups of filling — enough for one shallow 8-inch pie, or a thinly filled 9-inch. Scale by half again for a deep dish.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter of nutmeg is restrained by modern taste, which has been trained on commercial pumpkin pie spice. Add ginger or cloves if you want it, but the original flavour is squash and dairy, not spice.
- ServingSix modest wedges. Serve at room temperature or cold; a hot custard pie has not finished setting.
For much of the nineteenth century "pumpkin pie" and "squash pie" were near-interchangeable names for the same dish, and Hubbard and other winter varieties have drier, sweeter flesh than a field pumpkin. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional volume for its chocolate and cocoa, is a thoroughly Yankee book, and it treats squash pie as an everyday item rather than a holiday one he squsquash left from dinner. That thrift note is the real period marker here: a dessert built on the surplus of the same meal it followed, with eggs added when they could be spared and left out when they could not.