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Pumpkin Pie
1 cup baked pumpkin 2 cups milk 1/2 cup brown sugar 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon molasses To prepare the pumpkin, cut in halves. Remove the seeds, and place in the oven to bake until tender. Scrape out the cooked pumpkin, avoiding the skin formed by baking. Mash, and add the sugar, molasses, seasonings and milk. Line the pie-tin with any preferred pastry. Partially bake the crust, and turn into it the pumpkin mixture. Place in a moderate oven, and bake until set. Steamed or canned pumpkin may be used, but should be placed in the oven and baked until quite dry.
A wartime pie: no eggs, no cream, and a filling loosened with a full pint of milk. It will behave differently from the custard pumpkin pie most cooks expect, and the notes below are mostly about managing that.
- No eggs means no custardModern pumpkin pie sets because eggs coagulate. This one has none, so it relies entirely on the starch and pectin in the pumpkin plus long evaporation in the oven. Expect a soft, spoonable filling rather than a sliceable one, and cool it completely before cutting.
- The ratio is very thinOne cup of pumpkin to two cups of milk is far less pumpkin than a modern recipe would use for that much liquid. If you want it to hold a slice, use two cups of dry-baked pumpkin purée to one cup of milk and treat the original proportions as a historical record.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F. Allow 50 to 70 minutes; the pie is done when the outer two inches are set and the centre still shivers slightly.
- "Baked until quite dry" is the hingeWhether you start with fresh, steamed or canned pumpkin, spreading it on a sheet and drying it in the oven until it stops weeping is what keeps the crust from going to paste. Canned purée in particular carries a great deal of water.
- Blind-baking"Partially bake the crust" means line the shell with parchment and weights, bake 15 minutes at 400F, remove the weights and give it another 5 minutes until the surface looks dry and pale gold. A wet filling in a raw shell will not cook through underneath.
- Brown sugar and molassesLight or dark brown both work; the tablespoon of molasses adds colour and a mineral edge, and may also be stretching a scarce sugar supply. Blackstrap will overpower it, so use ordinary unsulphured molasses.
- Pumpkin varietyA field pumpkin grown for jack-o'-lanterns is watery and bland. Use a sugar or pie pumpkin, or a squash such as butternut or kabocha; much canned 'pumpkin' is itself a moschata squash rather than a true field pumpkin.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the English-speaking world during the First World War, when civilian food conservation campaigns urged households to save meat, wheat, fats and sugar for the armies and for allied populations. A pumpkin pie belongs in such a book for reasons beyond its meatlessness: pumpkin was cheap, it grew almost anywhere, it kept for months in a cool cellar, and it stretched a small quantity of milk and sugar into a dessert. The eggless filling here is plausibly a wartime economy rather than an oversight, and molasses standing in for part of the sugar may reflect the same instinct. The dish itself is much older, generally traced to the English custard and sweet-vegetable pies that colonists adapted in New England when squash was abundant and wheat flour was not; a handful of early references describe versions baked in a hollowed pumpkin shell before pastry crusts became standard.