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Pumpkin Pie (Cups cooked pumpkin cup milk)
1½ cups cooked pumpkin 3/4 cup milk 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon flour 1 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 cup sugar Cut the pumpkin in small pieces; peel, wash and steam or stew until tender. Mash to a pulp; cook as dry as possible without scorching and rub through a colander or coarse sieve. Mix thoroughly with the milk and other ingredients; pour into an open crust and bake slowly for forty or fifty minutes. Spices may be used in addition to the vanilla for flavoring if desired. Squash pie may be made from this recipe, using less milk.
A lean, old-style pumpkin custard: no cream, no molasses, and vanilla rather than the now-standard spice blend. The only real difficulty is water, both in the pumpkin and under the crust.
- Bake slowly means 325FBake slowly probably means around 300-325F -- a "slow" oven is generally taken as roughly that range, though the recipe itself gives no temperature. Forty to fifty minutes at that heat suits a shallow custard; the filling is done when the outer inch is set and the center still wobbles as a unit, not in ripples.
- Dry the pumpkin properlyThis is the hinge. Steamed or stewed pumpkin holds an enormous amount of water, and the instruction to "cook as dry as possible without scorching" is not optional -- skip it and the custard weeps and the crust turns to paste. Stir it over low heat in a wide pan until it mounds on the spoon.
- Canned pumpkin worksOne 15-oz can of solid-pack pumpkin gives about 1 3/4 cups, slightly more than the 1 1/2 cups called for, and is already fairly thick, so little or no further drying is needed. It is not pie filling, which is pre-sweetened and spiced.
- Protect the open crust"Open crust" is a single bottom shell, no top. A wet custard in a raw shell is the classic soggy-bottom setup; par-baking the shell blind at 400F until dry, then filling and lowering the oven, gives a much better result than the original method.
- Yield and panThe volume is modest -- roughly 3 cups of filling, which fits one 8- or 9-inch pie in a thin layer. It will serve six.
- Only 1/2 cup sugarThat is less than a typical modern pumpkin pie carries, and there is no brown sugar or molasses. Expect something distinctly vegetal and mild rather than sweet and dark.
- The spices, if you add themFor this quantity, roughly 1 teaspoon cinnamon with 1/2 teaspoon ginger and a scant 1/4 teaspoon each of nutmeg and cloves. The single tablespoon of flour is there as insurance against curdling and can be left out if the pumpkin is well dried.
- The squash variationWinter squash -- butternut, Hubbard, kabocha -- is denser and less watery than field pumpkin, hence the direction to use less milk. Start with 1/2 cup and judge by consistency.
Pumpkin baked in a crust is one of the oldest continuously made English-American sweets, generally traced to seventeenth-century colonial cooks adapting native squashes to the custard and "pumpion pie" traditions they already knew; by the nineteenth century it was fixed as a New England autumn and Thanksgiving dish. What dates this particular version is the reliance on fresh field pumpkin, cut and steamed and sieved by hand -- canned pumpkin was commercially available well before this recipe was printed but far from universal in home baking.