Pumpkin Pie
1½ cups steamed and strained pumpkin 2/3 cup brown sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 cup cream ½ teaspoon ginger ½ teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1½ cups milk Mix ingredients in order given and bake in one crust. CHEESE STRAWS. - Page 475.
COCOANUT TEA CAKES. - Page 477.
FRUIT BASKETS. - Page 479.
LEMON TARTLETS. - Page 479.
A plain single-crust custard pie of the kind Fannie Farmer favored: no molasses, no eggs beyond two, and a filling thin enough to pour. A few of the printed fractions have been mangled in transcription, and the recipe gives no oven heat at all.
- The ginger and saltThe printed page gives ½ teaspoon ginger and ½ teaspoon salt, which is what our text now reads. Those amounts suit this quantity of custard.
- Steamed and strained pumpkinCut a pie pumpkin or other dense winter squash, steam until soft, scrape the flesh from the skin and press it through a sieve. One 15-oz can of solid-pack pumpkin (not pie filling, which is already sweetened and spiced) gives roughly 1¾ cups, a little more than the 1½ cups called for.
- Drain the puréeHome-steamed pumpkin carries far more water than canned. If the strained purée pools liquid, let it drain in a sieve or cook it down in a dry pan for a few minutes, or the custard will weep and the bottom crust will go soft.
- Oven heatThe book assumes you know. Start at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F for another 35 to 45 minutes. The pie is done when the outer two inches are firm and the center still wobbles as one piece; it finishes setting as it cools.
- "Bake in one crust"A single bottom crust, no lid and no lattice. The recipe does not give a pan size; a 9-inch plate suits the quantity. Line it with pastry and chill it firm before filling.
- Brown sugarNineteenth-century brown sugar was moister and less refined than the modern light brown packed in a box. Light brown, firmly packed, is the closest match; dark brown will push the flavor toward molasses and mask the ginger.
- Cream and milkHalf a cup of cream and 1½ cups of milk. Heavy cream with whole milk gives a richness close to the dairy of the period; skim milk gives a watery, grainy set.
- Yield and servingOne 9-inch pie, eight modest slices. Cool completely before cutting — at least three hours — and refrigerate any that keeps, since this is an egg-and-milk custard.
- The lines at the end"CHEESE STRAWS. — Page 475" and the rest are the book's own cross-references to nearby recipes, not part of the pie.
Pumpkin pie was already an old New England institution by the time this book appeared in 1896, and Farmer's version shows how far the dish had drifted from its colonial form. Early American pumpkin pies leaned on molasses and were often thickened heavily and spiced with mace and nutmeg; here the sweetening is brown sugar, the spice list is down to cinnamon and ginger, and the whole thing is a light egg custard baked in a single crust — a Thanksgiving pie for a household with a reliable cookstove and a set of standard measuring cups. The instruction to steam and strain the pumpkin reflects a kitchen that still bought squash whole; commercial canned pumpkin existed by the 1890s but was not yet the default, and Farmer's readers were expected to sieve their own. Her insistence on level measurements, which made her reputation at the Boston Cooking School, is why this recipe can be read as a formula at all rather than as a paragraph of advice about doing it by eye.