Pumpkin Pie
1½ cups prepared pumpkin
1 teaspoon salt
⅔ cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 cups milk
½ teaspoon ginger
Steam and strain fresh pumpkin or bake it and put it through a sieve. Canned pumpkin is ready to use. Add remaining ingredients in the order given. Turn into a crust-lined pan and bake. Use a rather high temperature at first, to cook the bottom and sides of crust. Reduce the temperature and continue cooking until a silver knife inserted in the center will come out clean. Do not let the pie boil, as that will make it watery.
Nut-meats (one-half cup) are a delicious addition. Whipped cream is also very good with pumpkin pie.
A plain custard-pie formula from the era before printed oven dials, so the temperatures and times are left to the cook. The important instruction is the one about not letting the pie boil.
- The pumpkin measureThe printed "1/½ cups prepared pumpkin" is a typesetting casualty; it is almost certainly 1½ cups, which is a standard proportion against 2 cups milk and 2 eggs. A 15-oz can holds rather more — about 1¾ cups.
- Two-stage baking"A rather high temperature at first" points to a hot oven; a modern reading would be roughly 425F for the first 10-15 minutes to set and colour the bottom crust, then down to 325-350F until the filling sets. The book gives no figures or times. Going straight to a moderate oven with a wet custard filling tends to produce a pale, sodden base.
- Do not let it boilAn egg-and-milk custard that reaches a simmer curdles, and the whey it releases is the "watery" pie the book warns of. Pull it when the outer inch is set and the centre still trembles; residual heat finishes it, and the silver-knife test is if anything a little late.
- Prepared pumpkinSteamed or baked fresh pumpkin carries far more water than canned. Drain it in a sieve or cook it down in a dry pan until it holds its shape on a spoon, or reduce the milk slightly.
- Sweetness and spiceTwo-thirds cup brown sugar is modest by current standards, and a teaspoon of cinnamon with half a teaspoon of ginger is a restrained mix — no clove, no nutmeg, no allspice. Add them if you want the flavour most people now expect from pumpkin pie.
- SaltA full teaspoon in a single pie reads high by today's standards. Half a teaspoon of fine table salt is nearer the mark.
- Yield and panThe quantities fill one deep 9-inch shell with a little to spare. Blind-baking the crust for 10 minutes before filling is a modern insurance policy the book does not offer.
Pumpkin custard baked in a crust is one of the oldest continuously made American sweets, descended from English spiced squash and carrot puddings and recorded in print by the late eighteenth century; Amelia Simmons gives two versions of "pompkin" pudding baked in paste in 1796. What dates this particular version is the flat aside that "canned pumpkin is ready to use." By the 1910s and 1920s commercially canned pumpkin was cheap and reliable enough that a mainstream household book could treat the fresh vegetable as the alternative rather than the default. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published this kind of compendium for the same audience it sold sewing patterns to: households running on a budget.