Pumpkin Pie
2 eggs 1/2 cup sugar 1 cup stewed pumpkin 1/4 teaspoon allspice 1/4 teaspoon cloves 1½ cups milk 1/4 teaspoon ginger Beat eggs, add to them sugar, pumpkin and spices. Beat it thoroughly and then add milk and mix thoroughly; then bake in a crust of pie paste.
A lean, plain custard filling — no cinnamon, no salt, no molasses — that assumes the cook already knows how to handle a single-crust pie. Two things the original leaves out entirely: the oven and the time.
- The garbled measurement"11/2 cups milk" is a typesetting artifact for 1 1/2 cups. With 2 eggs and 1 cup of pumpkin that gives a soft, pourable custard, which is what this filling should be.
- Oven and timingStart at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 350F for 30 to 40 minutes. The filling is done when the outer two inches are set and the center still wobbles as a single mass; it firms as it cools.
- Overbaking is the hingeThis is a milk-and-egg custard, and if it bakes until the center is firm in the oven it will weep and crack on the counter. Pull it early and let carryover heat finish the job.
- Stewed pumpkinMost likely pumpkin cooked soft and sieved rather than a watery mash; the recipe does not say. Whatever you use, drain it well or the pie will not set; canned purée (not pie filling, which is pre-sweetened and spiced) substitutes cup for cup.
- Crust"A crust of pie paste" implies a single bottom crust, since the filling is poured; the quantities suit roughly a 9-inch plate. Blind baking for 10 minutes with weights is worth the trouble here, since a wet custard poured into raw pastry tends toward a soggy base.
- Seasoning as writtenThere is no salt and no cinnamon, which reads flat to a modern palate accustomed to commercial pumpkin pie spice. A quarter teaspoon of salt is a defensible addition; cinnamon changes the character of the pie, so add it knowing you are departing from the book.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. The filling is shallow by current standards — if your plate is deep, increase everything by half.
Pumpkin baked in a crust is a long-standing English-American sweet, with seventeenth-century "pompion" pies that were often closer to a spiced, sliced squash tart than a custard. By the period of printed collections like this one, the custard form was the usual one: eggs, milk, sugar and a short list of warm spices stirred into stewed pumpkin, set down in a few lines with no method for the pastry. What is notable here is the spicing -- allspice, cloves and ginger, with no cinnamon, a narrower list than the cinnamon-forward blend sold as pumpkin pie spice today. The absence of an oven temperature is unremarkable for the period: a cook working a wood or coal range judged heat by hand and habit.