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Pumpkin Pie
2 cups stewed and strained pumpkin 2 cups rich milk or cream 3/4 cup brown or granulated sugar 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoon ginger 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cinnamon Mix pumpkin with milk, sugar, well beaten eggs, ginger, salt, cinnamon, and beat 2 minutes. Pour into pie tin which has been lined with pastry. Place in hot oven for fifteen minutes, then reduce heat and bake 45 minutes in moderate oven. To bring out flavor of pumpkin it must be very well baked. Royal Baking Powder is Absolutely Pure
A lean, old-style custard pie with very little spice and a generous amount of liquid. Two points need attention before you start: the oven numbers and the fact that this makes more filling than one standard shell will hold.
- Oven temperatures"Hot oven" is roughly 400-450F, "moderate" roughly 350-375F. Fifteen minutes hot sets the bottom crust before the wet filling can soak in, then 45 minutes at the lower heat cooks the custard through.
- YieldFour cups of pumpkin and milk plus two eggs comes to roughly four and a half cups of filling. That is a deep-dish 9-inch pie or two shallow 8-inch pies, not one standard shell. Overfilling a single tin will give you a spill and a raw centre.
- Stewed and strained pumpkinThis means fresh pumpkin cooked soft and pressed through a sieve, not the modern solid-pack tin. Canned pumpkin purée is thicker and drier; if you use it, the custard will be firmer than intended. Fresh purée should be drained well or the filling weeps.
- Judging donenessIgnore the clock at the end and watch the custard. It is set when the outer two inches are firm and the centre still wobbles as a single mass; a knife slid in an inch from the edge comes out clean. Baking until the middle is solid means a cracked, weeping pie once it cools.
- The egg ratioTwo eggs to four cups of pumpkin and milk is a soft, almost spoonable set by current standards. Many modern recipes use three eggs to a smaller volume of liquid. If you want a slice that stands up cleanly, add a third egg rather than extending the bake.
- SpicingA teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter teaspoon of ginger is restrained. Nutmeg, cloves and allspice are absent entirely, unlike a modern pumpkin-spice blend.
- "Rich milk"Somewhere between whole milk and light cream. Half-and-half is the closest single substitute.
- "It must be very well baked"The advice is sound for flavour, since a long bake concentrates the pumpkin, but it must not become an instruction to overcook the eggs. Take the pie out at a set edge and trembling centre and let carryover heat finish it; cool at least two hours before cutting.
This page comes from a cookbook published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, and the tagline at the foot of the page explains the book's existence: it was advertising in the form of a kitchen manual, put out to place the brand into American households. The pie itself needs no leavening at all, which shows how these collections worked — the useful recipes carried the promotional ones. Pumpkin pie in this form, a spiced squash custard in a pastry shell, is generally traced to New England, where cooks adapted the older English tradition of sweet vegetable and root custards to the native winter squashes; it was firmly established as a Thanksgiving dish by the mid-nineteenth century, well before this book appeared. The direction to stew and strain the pumpkin yourself belongs to the era before solid-pack canned pumpkin became the default, which happened over the first decades of the twentieth century.