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Pumpkin or Squash Custard
Make a custard of eggs, a quart of milk, and sugar, and mix mashed pumpkin with it to suit--1 quart of mashed pumpkin is about right.
This is a working baker's shorthand rather than a formula: it assumes you know what a custard is and how many eggs it takes. A few numbers fill the gaps.
- The missing egg countA quart of milk plus a quart of pumpkin will want roughly 6 to 8 whole eggs to set firmly enough to slice. With fewer, the mixture tends to stay loose and weep; the pumpkin thickens the mix but does little to set it.
- Quart measuresA quart is 4 cups, so this makes a large batch: 4 cups milk, 4 cups mashed pumpkin, plus eggs and sugar. That is enough for two to three 9-inch pies or roughly a dozen individual custard cups.
- Sugar, unspecifiedFor a custard of this size, about 1 to 1 1/2 cups is a workable starting point. Begin at 1 cup and adjust to taste as you mix.
- Mashed pumpkinThe original means field pumpkin or winter squash cooked until soft and mashed, not canned puree. Canned solid-pack pumpkin is drier and denser; if you use it, expect a stiffer custard, and thin with a little extra milk. Fresh-cooked pumpkin is often watery enough to need draining in a sieve first.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. Ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt in the usual proportions belong here; without salt the whole thing tastes flat.
- OvenBake at 325-350F. Custards curdle and weep above that, and a large quart-scale custard is especially prone to it. In cups, set them in a pan of hot water; in a crust, bake on a low rack so the bottom sets.
- DonenessPull it when the edge is set and the center still trembles as a single mass, roughly 45-60 minutes depending on the vessel. Carryover heat finishes the middle; a knife that comes out clean at the center means it has gone slightly too far.
Pumpkin custard is the older and simpler relative of pumpkin pie: the same filling, baked with or without a crust, and a fixture of New England kitchens long before it became a fixed holiday item. Books aimed at professional bakers and hotel cooks tend to state such fillings as ratios rather than recipes, since the reader was expected to scale them to whatever number of pies the day required, and to know the house's own spice mix. The instruction to "mix mashed pumpkin with it to suit" reflects a real variable: squash and pumpkin cooked down at home vary enormously in moisture and sweetness depending on the variety and how long they were stored, so the cook judged by eye. Squash and pumpkin were interchangeable in American cookery of the period, and some nineteenth-century writers are said to have preferred a good winter squash for pie.