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Pumpkin Transparent Pie
Made without milk or eggs. 2 pounds of pumpkin--or 1 quart. 1 pound of sugar. 4 ounces of butter.
Flavoring either of lemon rind, cloves or nutmeg. The pumpkin must be dry, either baked or steamed. Mash it through a strainer, mix the sugar and butter with it and let simmer at the side of the range to become thick. Flavor, and bake in crusts.
An eggless, milkless pie filling that works more like a stiff pumpkin preserve than a custard. The success of it rests entirely on driving off water before the filling ever meets the crust.
- The hinge: cook it down firstWith no eggs or milk, nothing sets in the oven. The filling must be simmered until a spoon drawn through it leaves a track that closes slowly, which can take 30-45 minutes over low heat. Underdone, it will soak the bottom crust and run when cut.
- "At the side of the range"A coal range was hottest over the firebox and cooler at the edges, so this means a bare simmer. Use the lowest burner setting and a heavy pan, and stir often; the sugar concentration makes scorching likely toward the end.
- Dry pumpkinBake or steam a sugar pumpkin or other dense winter squash, never boil it. Canned solid-pack pumpkin (not pie filling) is a fair substitute: 2 pounds is roughly 3 1/2 cups, though it still needs reducing.
- The quart measureThe recipe treats 2 pounds and 1 quart as equivalent, which holds only for cooked, mashed pulp. Weigh it if you can.
- Sugar levelA pound of sugar to two pounds of pulp is sweet by current taste, closer to a jam than a modern pumpkin pie. Cutting it to 10-12 ounces is possible if you are eating the pie the same day, but expect a slacker, less preserve-like filling, since the sugar is doing some of the thickening and keeping work.
- FlavoringAdd the lemon rind, cloves or nutmeg at the end, off the heat, which is the order the recipe itself gives. Long simmering drives off the volatile oils and dulls the flavor.
- Oven and crustNo temperature is given. Bake at 400F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then 350F for another 20-25 minutes; the filling is already cooked, so you are only baking pastry. A blind-baked shell also works, in which case the pie needs only enough time to color.
- YieldThe plural "crusts" implies more than one pie; the quantity should fill roughly two 9-inch single-crust shells, or one deep pie with pastry strips over the top.
"Transparent" pies and puddings run through nineteenth-century American and British baking books, the name describing a filling that cooks to a clear, glossy, jelly-like body rather than an opaque custard, usually from sugar, butter and eggs cooked together. This version drops the dairy and eggs entirely. The technique, reducing a sweetened fruit or vegetable pulp until it thickens on its own, is the same one behind apple butter and pumpkin butter.