Home › Pastry, Pies and Tarts › Squash Pie
Squash Pie
Boil and sift a good dry squash, thin it with boiling milk until it is about the consistency of thick milk porridge. To every quart of this add three eggs, two great spoonfuls of melted butter or ginger, and sweeten quite sweet with sugar. Bake in a deep plate with an undercrust.
A nineteenth-century squash pie is a custard pie: the proportion of eggs to liquid is what sets it, and everything else is seasoning. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need supplying.
- "A good dry squash"Means a mature winter squash with dense, low-moisture flesh — Hubbard, buttercup, kabocha, or a small pie pumpkin. Summer squash will not work. Roasting halves cut-side down rather than boiling gives a drier purée and saves you fighting the milk back out again.
- SiftingThe cooked flesh was pressed through a sieve or colander to break the fibres. A food processor or ricer does the same job; the point is a purée with no strings in it, since strings show up badly in a set custard.
- "Thick milk porridge"The consistency of a pourable oatmeal — thick enough to mound slightly on a spoon, loose enough to level itself in the shell. Add the hot milk gradually; a very dry squash may take a cup or more per quart of purée, a wetter one almost none.
- "Two great spoonfuls"A great spoonful is a generous tablespoon, so roughly 1 oz of melted butter per quart. The "butter or ginger" reads as a printer's slip for "and ginger" — two tablespoons of ground ginger to a quart would be punishing, so take the ginger as one to two teaspoons and keep the butter.
- Sweetening"Quite sweet" gives no quantity. A workable modern amount is about 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar per quart of thinned squash, adjusted to taste. Taste the mixture before the eggs go in and judge it slightly sweeter than you want the baked pie, since chilling flattens sweetness.
- OvenBake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for another 35 to 45 minutes. The pie is done when the outer two inches are set and the centre still shivers; carryover heat finishes it. Baked hard all the way through, a custard of this kind weeps and cracks.
- Undercrust onlyA single bottom crust in a deep plate. Blind-baking it for ten minutes before filling is not in the original but prevents the sogginess that plagues wet custard fillings.
- YieldA quart of thinned squash with three eggs, once the sugar and butter are added, makes roughly enough for one deep nine-inch plate, with any surplus baked alongside in a ramekin.
Squash pie and pumpkin pie were largely interchangeable in New England kitchens, and older cookbooks often print one recipe covering both — squash was frequently preferred as drier, sweeter and less stringy than field pumpkin. The technique here, sieving a boiled vegetable and building it into a milk-and-egg custard, descends from the sweet root and vegetable pies of English cookery, where carrot and potato pies were made the same way. What stands out is the confidence that the reader knows what "thick milk porridge" looks like: porridge was a daily food, so it served as a reliable yardstick. The instructions assume a cook who has watched pies made and needs only the proportions.