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Summer Squash Pie
— Inez B. Curtis
1 cup sugar, 1 heaping cup of sifted squash, 1 heaping tbsp. of sifted flour, a little ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon, a little salt; stir all together, add 1/4 cups of scalded milk, then 1 egg well beaten. Bake in a moder-
— Mrs. E. Knight
ate oven.
A custard pie in the pumpkin mould, built on summer squash rather than winter. The original assumes a good deal of knowledge on the cook's part, including the pie shell it never mentions.
- The missing crustNothing in the text says to line a pan, but the batter is a thin custard. Pour it into an unbaked single 9-inch shell.
- "Sifted squash"This means summer squash cooked until soft and pressed through a sieve to remove seeds, skin and strings, not raw grated squash. A heaping cup of purée is roughly 9-10 oz.
- Drain itSummer squash carries far more water than pumpkin or a winter squash. Let the purée sit in a sieve or press it in a towel before measuring, or the custard will weep and the bottom crust will stay raw.
- The milk quantity"1/4 cups of scalded milk" may be a typesetting loss of "1 1/4 cups": the plural "cups" suggests a dropped figure, and a quarter cup makes a very dense filling against a cup of sugar and a full cup of squash. Treat the amount as ambiguous and lean toward 1 1/4 cups.
- ScaldingBringing the milk just to the point of steaming, short of a boil, was standard practice and it warms the batter so the custard sets more evenly. Add it to the dry mixture before the egg so the egg does not curdle on contact.
- Moderate oven350F. Custard pies are often started hotter — around 425F for the first ten minutes to set the pastry — then dropped to 350F, but the original gives one temperature throughout.
- DonenessBake 45-55 minutes. The edge should be set and the centre still shivering slightly when the pan is nudged; it firms as it cools. A fully firm centre in the oven means an overbaked, weeping pie.
- Spicing"A little" of each spice reads as about 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon ginger and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. One cup of sugar to one cup of squash is sweet by current taste; three-quarters of a cup is defensible.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Refrigerate leftovers — this is an egg-and-milk custard.
Community cookbooks of this kind are full of pies that borrow the pumpkin formula and swap in whatever the garden gave up first. Summer squash and the yellow crooknecks come in months before any pumpkin is ready, and the flesh is mild and pale enough that sugar, ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon carry the whole flavour — the squash is doing the work of thickener and body more than taste. Philathea books are generally understood to have been compiled by Philathea classes, the young women's Bible-study organisation that spread through Protestant Sunday schools in the early twentieth century, with contributions gathered by name from members, though the text here does not identify the book itself. The double attribution, with Inez B. Curtis at the head and Mrs. E. Knight interrupting mid-word, is some kind of production artifact — a compositor's slip, a column mis-scan or a transcription error — and the last words are meant to read "a moderate oven."