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Pumpkin Butter-Fine Quality
2 pounds or pints of dry mashed pumpkin. 1 pound of sugar. 4 ounces of butter. Flavoring either of shaved lemon rind, cloves, nutmeg or race ginger. The pumpkin must be dry, either baked or steamed. Mash it through a strainer, mix the sugar and butter with it and the piece of ginger bruised, or thin shaved lemon rind; let simmer at the side or set upon bricks on the stove for perhaps an hour. It becomes thick and semi-transparent; can be kept in jars in a dark place. Good for the same uses as fruit jellies and marmalade.
The cooking here is straightforward — the problem is the last line. Pumpkin butter is a low-acid purée, and there is no safe way to hold it as the book directs.
- Why the storage failsPumpkin is a low-acid, dense purée; sugar at this ratio (one part to two of pumpkin) is nowhere near enough to preserve it, and the hour of gentle simmering never approaches a temperature that would sterilise the jar. Sealed in jars and kept at room temperature in a dark place, it is a textbook medium for Clostridium botulinum, which thrives without oxygen in exactly these conditions.
- No approved process existsPumpkin and winter squash butters are among the very few products for which USDA and the National Center for Home Food Preservation give no tested canning process at all — not boiling water bath, not pressure. The purée is too thick for heat to penetrate reliably to the centre of the jar. Consult current preservation guidance rather than this page if you want to keep any quantity.
- "2 pounds or pints" of pumpkinWhitehead is treating dry mashed pumpkin as roughly a pound to the pint, which holds for a firm, well-drained purée. Two pints is about four cups — considerably more than the 1¾ cups in a standard 15-oz can of solid-pack pumpkin.
- Race ginger"Race" here means a root: the word is generally traced to Old French raiz or Spanish raíz, ultimately Latin radix. It means whole dried or fresh ginger root rather than the ground powder. Bruising it releases the oils and lets you fish the piece out at the end, which is the point of using it whole.
- "Set upon bricks on the stove"Heat on a solid-fuel range was regulated by position rather than a dial, which is why the recipe offers two options: the cooler side of the range, or a brick under the pan to lift it off the hot plate. The equivalent is the lowest burner you have, ideally with a diffuser — a thick sugar-and-puree mixture scorches on the bottom long before the top shows any sign of it.
- "Dry" pumpkin is the hingeBaked or steamed, then pressed through a strainer, so no cooking water goes in. A watery purée will not reach the semi-transparent, thickened state described no matter how long it simmers, and the extra time only increases the risk of catching on the pan.
- SpittingAs it thickens the mixture behaves like apple butter and throws scalding blobs. A spatter screen and a long-handled spoon are worth having.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for working hotel and restaurant cooks and stewards in the late nineteenth century, and this entry is characteristic: a cheap bulk ingredient turned into something that could stand in for an expensive one. Fruit butters — apple above all, then peach, plum and quince — were a standard American way of using a glut, cooked down slowly at the edge of a range until the sugars concentrated and the purée went dark and glossy. Pumpkin was the cheapest raw material of the lot, and Whitehead's closing note that it is "good for the same uses as fruit jellies and marmalade" is the commercial argument: a pastry department could fill turnovers, layer cakes and tarts with it at a fraction of the cost of imported preserves. The confidence about keeping it in jars in a dark place reflects a period before the bacteriology of anaerobic spoilage was understood; botulism was identified in sausage in the nineteenth century but its connection to home-canned low-acid vegetables was not established in the United States until the 1920s.