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Pumpkin Pie
For one deep pie allow two cups of stewed pumpkin; one-half teaspoon of salt; one-half teaspoon of cinnamon; two-thirds cup of sugar; one teaspoon of ginger; two eggs; one pint of milk (scant measure). Beat the eggs until light. Place the pumpkin in a quart measure, add the sugar, salt and spice and then the beaten eggs. Stir well and add sufficient milk to make a quart of the whole mass. Turn into a pie tin lined with paste and bake slowly for forty-five minutes. When a silver knife inserted in the pie will come from it clear, it is done. In baking pies they should, if possible, be kept from boiling. Pumpkin, squash and custard pies will become watery if allowed to boil.
MINCE MEAT No. I-Stew gently two pounds of lean beef in a very little water until quite tender, let it get cold and then chop as fine as possible. Add one pound of finely chopped beef suet; four pounds of peeled, cored and chopped tart apples; three pounds of sugar; three pounds of currants; two pounds of raisins; one grated nutmeg; one-half teaspoon of ground mace; the grated rind of two oranges and one lemon; one-half pound of citron (chopped); one tablespoon of salt; the juice of two lemons; one-half pint of sherry and one wineglass of brandy. Mix thoroughly and pack in a stone jar. The mince meat should be thoroughly stirred each time any is taken out and occasionally moistened with a little sherry or orange juice.
MINCE MEAT, No. 2-Three pounds of cold boiled lean beef; twice the amount of sour apples; three pounds of raisins; two pounds of English currants; half a pound of suet; half a pound of citron; two tablespoons of butter; two pounds of sugar; one pint of cider vinegar; one pint of New Orleans molasses; teaspoon each of ground cloves; cinnamon and mace; one nutmeg; two tablespoons of salt. Mince the meat fine, chop the apples, stone and partially chop the raisins, wash and dry the currants, cut the citron in fine pieces, chop the suet and melt the butter. Mix all together thoroughly, put in a porcelain kettle and scald. If the mince meat is too dry, add a little warm water when you use it.
The pumpkin pie is straightforward and still works; the two mince meats that follow it on the page are the problem, and the trouble is storage rather than flavour. Notes on both are below.
- Why the caution — Mince Meat No. 1Cooked beef and suet are mixed with fruit, packed into a stone jar and then dipped into repeatedly over weeks at cellar temperature, with no canning process and no measured acid. Sugar, sherry and brandy at these proportions cannot be relied on to hold a low-acid meat mixture safely for that long, and opening and stirring the jar each time introduces fresh contamination. Use a current tested recipe if you want to keep mincemeat.
- Mince Meat No. 2 has the same faultScalding in a porcelain kettle is not a process — it is a brief heating with no temperature, no hold time and no sealed container. The pint of cider vinegar helps but is not a measured acidification, and the recipe gives no storage instruction at all. Meat mincemeat is not safe for water-bath canning; it requires pressure canning or freezing at proportions the original does not supply.
- "Bake slowly" for the pieThe book gives no temperature; in a modern oven this means something in the region of 300 to 325F. The point of the low heat is the instruction that follows it: a custard that boils will curdle and weep, which is exactly the watery pumpkin pie the recipe warns against.
- Two cups stewed pumpkinOne 15-oz can of plain pumpkin purée is close enough — not pumpkin pie filling, which is already sweetened and spiced. If you cook your own, drain it well; wet pumpkin throws off the liquid balance the quart measure is meant to control.
- The quart measure is the real methodRather than fixing the milk, the recipe fills the mixed pumpkin, sugar, spice and eggs up to one quart total. That self-corrects for thick or thin pumpkin. A scant pint of milk is the usual amount; add it gradually and stop at the quart line.
- Deep pie tinA 9-inch deep-dish shell. A quart of custard is more than most standard shallow 9-inch pans will hold.
- The knife test, adjustedTest an inch or two in from the edge, not dead centre. When that comes out clean the middle should still wobble slightly; it sets as it cools, and a pie baked until the centre is firm has already gone grainy. Forty-five minutes is realistic at 325F.
- Currants and New Orleans molassesCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. "New Orleans molasses" is ordinary full-flavour unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter.
- Old liquid measuresA wineglass is roughly 2 fluid ounces. A gill, if you meet it elsewhere in this book, is half a cup.
- YieldThe pumpkin pie serves six to eight. Either mince meat makes an enormous quantity — well over a gallon — which is why the original assumed a stone jar in a cold cellar.
History: Pumpkin pie as a spiced custard baked in a pastry shell is a New England fixture that had become national by the turn of the twentieth century, helped along by Thanksgiving's spread as a civic holiday from the Civil War years onward. Placing it beside two mince meats is not accidental: both belong to the same late-autumn pantry, when squash was cured for keeping and the year's beef and apples were coming in together. The mince meats show how recently sweet and savoury sat in the same dish — meat, suet, dried fruit, sugar, spice and brandy in one jar, a formula generally traced back to medieval English spiced meat pies and still, at the time this book was printed, an ordinary way to make it. The suetless, meatless jarred mincemeat familiar today is a twentieth-century simplification, and the shift owes something to the fact that keeping the older kind sound was genuinely difficult.