Home › Recipes › Brown Squash Pie
Brown Squash Pie
2 pounds of dry mashed squash--a quart. 8 ounces of molasses. 2 ounces of butter. 8 eggs. Ginger and allspice. 1 quart of milk. Mix the butter with the squash while still warm, then the molasses and rest of the ingredients. With the right kind of molasses or part black molasses and part sugar, and spice skillfully proportioned this variety proves to be a favorite.
Allowing that is not strictly in the line of hotel fellows' duty to pass opinions upon manners and ways people have but considering the many aspersions that are cast upon pie and its friends, may we not ask one question--it is not more American like to like pie and say you like pie, and make it big and make it good, than to beat about the bush and try to hide an inordinate admiration of pie under such names as darioles, bouchees, mirlitons, flans, vol-au-vents, tourtes, tartelettes and a lot more as the French do, and turnovers, puffs and tarts like the English? You will find if you look that Mr. Clive Newcome, in The Newcomes, when a boy at college was remarkably fond of raspberry tarts and it took all his pocket money and much that he managed to get from a friend or two besides to purchase them, and there is nothing sardonic in Mr. Thackeray's statement of that not uncommon trait of his. But those raspberry tarts are not to be conf unded for a minute with the indescribable English household pie-the tarts were and are neither more nor less--except in size--than our American open pies. Could Mr. Clive be blamed for loving them? Why even American collegians are not above such a weakness as that.
Tarte, tourte, tart is the European for the American pie, made open--that is without a top crust--or at most with only strips across. The tart proper is not larger than the palm of the hand, and is made in patty pans or small pie pans of any form, oval, oblong, square or round. People like pie for supper, and country hotels with the old style of long table set them on it, but Fashion does not allow it. But you can circumvent Fashion (and sne will be secretly pleased thereby) by serving tarts both for luncheon and supper. Now tarts or tiny pies are tedious to make in numbers and advantage must be taken, get the shallow patty-pans fastened together a dozen in a bunch. Roll out the paste to an eighth of an inch thickness in a large sheet, and cut out flats with a biscuit cutter or any oval or other cutter that will match your patty-pans. Press the paste with the thumbs to the shape, cut off the surplus even with the edges and put in a spoonful of any kind of pie fruit or of the mixtures just preceding, or of the various creams, apple or cocoanut cream etc and you can give pie for supper luncheon and tea and Fashion will never be the wiser.
For some of the pie mixtures such as the chocolate cream, puff-paste is not the best. The annexed is a kind specially made for "small bakings."
This is a professional-scale custard filling with no oven temperature, no spice quantities and no pan count — all things the hotel baker it was written for would have supplied from habit. The numbers below are the ones you need to fill in.
- YieldTwo pounds of squash, a quart of milk and eight eggs makes roughly three quarts of filling — enough for about four nine-inch open pies. Scale to a quarter of the recipe for a single pie: about 1 cup mashed squash, 2 to 2 1/2 tablespoons molasses, 1 tablespoon butter, 2 eggs, 1 cup milk.
- "Dry mashed squash"The word doing the work is dry. Bake or steam the squash and drive off the moisture in a pan over low heat until the purée holds a mound on the spoon; wet squash gives a filling that weeps and never sets. Two pounds of cooked purée measuring a quart is a useful check that you have reduced it far enough.
- Ounces are weightEight ounces of molasses is by weight, roughly 2/3 cup; two ounces of butter is half a stick. Note that the recipe mixes systems: molasses and butter by weight, milk by volume, squash given both ways.
- Molasses"Black molasses" probably means the darkest, strongest grade, close to what is now sold as blackstrap, though the term was also used loosely for dark molasses generally. Straight blackstrap is bitter to modern palates, so the recipe's own suggestion of part black molasses and part sugar is the safer route: half the molasses replaced with an equal weight of brown sugar.
- Spice, unquantifiedNo amounts are given because "skillfully proportioned" was the baker's job. For the full batch, a reasonable starting point is 4 teaspoons ground ginger and 2 teaspoons allspice; adjust on the next batch rather than tasting the raw egg mixture.
- OvenNone is stated. Treat it as any custard pie: 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then down to 350F for 35–45 minutes until the center reaches 175F and moves as a single sheet when the pan is nudged. It will still be slightly loose at the middle and will finish setting as it cools.
- Mixing orderButter into the warm squash first, as written — it emulsifies rather than sitting in flecks. Add the eggs and milk only once the purée has cooled to lukewarm, or you will get threads of cooked egg. Straining the finished mixture is worth the minute it takes.
- Open pieThe essay defines the American pie it is defending as an open one, no lid, at most strips across the top, though it does not say so of this filling specifically. Fillings like this one are presumably among "the mixtures just preceding" that the passage sends you off to put in patty-pans for tarts.
Squash and pumpkin pie were used more or less interchangeably in American cookbooks through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and squash was sometimes preferred for cooking down drier; which of the two is the older New England habit is not settled. Molasses rather than sugar as the sweetener is the other mark of age here — it was the cheap sweetener of the coastal trade, and "black" molasses gave the pie the color the title advertises. The digression that follows the recipe places the book in its trade: the author writes as one of the "hotel fellows", arguing that the American open pie is the same object as the European tart and needs no French name to justify it. The reference is to Thackeray's The Newcomes, serialized 1853–55, whose young Clive Newcome's appetite for raspberry tarts the author cites as proof that those tarts were nothing but American open pies under another name — while expressly distinguishing them from the English household pie.