Pumpkin Pie
1 1/2 cups prepared pumpkin 2/3 cup brown sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon ginger 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 2 cups milk Steam and strain fresh pumpkin or bake it and put it through a sieve. Canned pumpkin is ready to use. Add remaining ingredients in the order given. Turn into a crust-lined pan and bake. Use a rather high temperature at first, to cook the bottom and sides of crust. Reduce the temperature and continue cooking until a silver knife inserted in the center will come out clean. Do not let the pie boil, as that will make it watery. Nut-meats (one-half cup) are a delicious addition. Whipped cream is also very good with pumpkin pie.
A plain custard-style pumpkin pie from the era just before pre-spiced canned filling took over. The instructions give no numbers for the oven, so the two-stage bake is the part that needs translating.
- The hinge: never let the custard boilAn egg-and-milk filling that bubbles curdles, and the whey it releases is the "watery" pie the recipe warns about. Pull it while the outer inch is set and the center still wobbles slightly; it firms as it cools.
- Oven temperatures"A rather high temperature at first" means 425-450F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust bottom, then down to 325-350F for roughly 35-45 minutes more. The knife test in the original still works, but test halfway between center and rim rather than dead center.
- Pan size and volumeA cup and a half of pumpkin plus two cups of milk, the sugar and the eggs makes something over four cups of filling, which is more than a shallow 9-inch shell holds. Use a deep 9-inch or a 10-inch pie plate, or hold back a little of the milk.
- Prepared pumpkinThis means cooked, drained and sieved flesh, not raw puree. Home-cooked pumpkin holds far more water than canned; drain it in a sieve or cloth until it mounds on a spoon, or the custard will not set. Canned pumpkin here is plain pumpkin, not pie filling, which is already sweetened and spiced.
- Milk, not evaporated or condensedWhole milk gives a soft, lightly set, old-fashioned custard rather than the dense modern slice. For a firmer pie, replace up to half the milk with cream or evaporated milk.
- The saltA full teaspoon reads high to modern palates in a sweet pie. Half a teaspoon is closer to current practice if you are using salted butter in the crust.
- Blind bakingThe two-stage bake is this book's substitute for pre-baking the shell. If your crust still goes soggy, blind bake it at 425F until dry and pale before filling.
- YieldOne deep 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. The optional half cup of nutmeats is best chopped fine and scattered over the filling once it has begun to set, so they do not sink.
Pumpkin baked in a crust is one of the oldest continuously made American sweets, descended from English custard and "pompion" pies of the seventeenth century, and it was firmly fixed to Thanksgiving by the nineteenth. What dates this particular version is the aside that "canned pumpkin is ready to use": canned pumpkin was on the market from the later nineteenth century and was thoroughly established, dependable and cheap by the 1920s. The spicing is also of its moment - cinnamon and ginger only, with no nutmeg, cloves or molasses - a leaner, milder profile than either the colonial recipes before it or the four-spice blends sold today. Whipped cream is offered as a suggestion rather than an assumption.