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Pumpkin Pie (Eggs well beaten cup sugar)
2 eggs well beaten 3/4 cup sugar 2 cups milk 1½ cups cooked pumpkin Mix the ingredients; salt to taste, season with nutmeg, cinnamon, a little ginger and melted butter. Bake in the cooker one hour.
This is a pumpkin custard rather than a pie in the modern sense — no crust is called for, and the "cooker" of the section heading is a fireless cooker, an insulated box heated by preheated soapstone or cast-iron discs. Everything below is about translating that vessel and that custard ratio.
- What "the cooker" wasA fireless cooker was a sawdust- or asbestos-lined box into which you dropped iron or soapstone radiators heated red-hot on the range, then sealed the food in to cook by retained heat. It behaves like a low, falling-temperature oven, which is why a delicate custard suited it.
- Oven substituteIn a conventional oven, something in the 325-350F range is the nearest practical substitute, though the cooker's heat was lower and falling rather than held. Set the dish in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides to imitate the cooker's gentle, even heat.
- The hinge: pull it before it looks doneEgg custard sets between about 170F and 180F and curdles not far above that. Take it out when the edges are firm and the centre still trembles; the residual heat finishes it. The original hour is a reasonable guide at 325F for a shallow dish, longer for a deep one.
- Custard ratioTwo eggs to two cups milk plus 1 1/2 cups pumpkin is a soft set - fine for a spooned custard, too loose to slice cleanly in a crust. If you want pie wedges, a third egg, or a more concentrated milk in place of some of the fresh, will firm it up.
- Cooked pumpkinMeans drained, mashed field-pumpkin flesh, not sweetened pie filling. Canned solid-pack pumpkin works; if you roast your own, let it drain in a sieve or the custard will weep.
- Seasoning amountsNone are given. For this quantity, roughly 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1/4 tsp ginger, 1/2 tsp salt and a tablespoon of melted butter sits comfortably in period range.
- YieldAbout four cups of custard — one 9-inch shell, or six small ramekins.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and 1920, promoted in bulletins, women's magazines and cookbooks as a way to cut fuel bills and free the cook from tending a range all afternoon; the same insulated-box principle survives in the modern thermal cooker and, in spirit, in the slow cooker. Custards, cereals, dried beans and pot roasts were the classic fireless dishes, because all of them want long, moderate, unattended heat and none of them want browning - which is precisely why this pumpkin recipe appears without a crust or a top-heat finish. Pumpkin custards of this kind, spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger and thinned with milk, are an older form of American pumpkin pie: some early versions were baked in a dish rather than a pastry shell, though crusted versions are recorded from the eighteenth century as well, and the sweetened, evaporated-milk filling familiar today belongs to the canned-pumpkin era that followed.