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Pumpkin Pie
Boil and strain the pumpkins, allowing for three pints two tablespoonfuls of flour, four eggs, one pound of sugar, one tablespoonful of ground ginger, one teaspoonful of salt, and two quarts of milk. Stir all well together while the pumpkin is hot. Butter a pie-dish, line it with a thin layer of short paste, put the mixture into it and bake in a moderate oven for a little less than one hour. Serve the pie while hot.
A restaurant-scale formula written as a ratio rather than a single pie: three pints of pumpkin pulp and two quarts of milk will fill four to five nine-inch shells. Scale down before you start.
- Yield and scalingAs written this is roughly 3 lb of cooked pumpkin plus 8 cups of milk, enough for four or five 9-inch pies. For one pie, use about 1 1/2 cups pumpkin purée, 1 egg, a generous 1/2 cup sugar, 2 cups milk (or 1 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream for a firmer set), 3/4 teaspoon ginger, 1/4 teaspoon salt and about 1 1/2 teaspoons of the flour.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F, though the recipe gives no temperature. Custard pies set between 325F and 375F; hotter and the eggs curdle at the edge before the middle thickens.
- The hinge: hot pumpkin, cold eggsThe instruction to stir everything together "while the pumpkin is hot" will scramble the eggs if you tip them straight in. Whisk the eggs with the sugar and add the hot pumpkin in a thin stream, stirring, then the milk.
- Short pasteAn unsweetened shortcrust. A wet custard filling soaks a raw bottom crust, so blind-bake the shell at 400F until dry and pale, then lower the oven and fill it.
- Doneness, not timeJudge by the filling rather than by "a little less than one hour": set to within an inch or two of the centre, which still trembles, or 170-175F on a thermometer. It firms as it cools.
- The milk ratioTwo quarts of milk to three pints of pumpkin gives a very loose, almost drinkable batter by modern standards, and a soft, sliceable-but-wobbly pie. Canned purée is thicker and drier than boiled fresh pumpkin, so if you use it you can hold back some of the liquid.
- Boiling the pumpkinBoiled and strained pumpkin carries a lot of water. Drain it well in a sieve, or roast the halved squash instead, which concentrates the flavour rather than diluting it.
- SeasoningGinger and salt only, with no cinnamon, nutmeg, clove or molasses. That is the older, plainer taste; add the rest if you want the modern spice profile, but taste the ginger version first.
- ServingServe hot, as directed. Whipped cream is the usual modern accompaniment.
Pumpkin was a New World field crop that English colonists folded into an existing European habit of baking sweetened custards in pastry, and by the nineteenth century the pie had become fixed to the American autumn table and to Thanksgiving in particular. The quantities read like a production sheet rather than a household recipe -- pints and quarts and pounds. The seasoning is worth noting: ginger carries the whole dish, with no cinnamon or clove, which makes this recipe an outlier beside the more heavily spiced pumpkin pie most Americans now recognise.