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Squash Pudding
1½ cups cooked and strained squash teaspoonful cinnamon cup sugar 2 eggs ½ teaspoonful salt 1½ cups milk Grated rind of half a lemon Gradually add the milk to the strained squash, then the sugar, salt, seasoning, slightly beaten eggs, and grated lemon-peel. Pour into a buttered pudding-dish and bake in moderate oven until thickened like custard. Serve very cold.
A crustless squash custard, essentially pumpkin pie filling baked on its own, built to use up yesterday's boiled winter squash. The ingredient list has come through the scanner with pieces missing, so a few amounts need judgment.
- The garbled amountsThe numerals for the cinnamon and the sugar have dropped out; as printed, both are unreadable, and there is no way to recover them from the text. For a custard of this size, ½ to ⅔ cup sugar and about 1 teaspoon cinnamon are in a workable range, but that is a cook's guess, not what the page says. The salt at a full teaspoon is high by modern taste; ½ teaspoon is plenty.
- Moderate oven350F. For a custard this loose, 325F is safer against curdling and will not meaningfully lengthen the bake.
- Squash, cooked and strainedThis means winter squash, boiled or steamed, then pushed through a sieve to a smooth purée. Canned pumpkin or squash purée works directly. Drain watery purée in a sieve first, or the custard will weep.
- Set the custard, don't overbakeThe hinge is the same as any baked custard: pull it when the centre still trembles and a knife an inch from the edge comes out clean. Carried past that point it curdles and beads with liquid. Expect 40 to 55 minutes in a shallow dish.
- Water bathThe recipe does not call for one, but standing the pudding-dish in a pan of hot water gives a noticeably smoother set at this ratio of 2 eggs to 1½ cups milk plus purée, which is a soft custard by design.
- Buttered dishButter is for release only; there is no crust. A 1- to 1½-quart baking dish suits this quantity.
- Yield and servingFour to six servings. "Serve very cold" means chilled several hours — it firms considerably in the refrigerator, and the cinnamon and lemon read cleaner cold than warm.
Left-over cookery books of the early twentieth century were a genre in themselves, driven by household economy campaigns and, later, wartime food conservation: the assumption was often that a cook boiled squash for dinner and would be judged on what she did with the surplus, though this recipe need not have come from such a book. Squash pudding belongs to a long New England line in which winter squash and pumpkin are treated interchangeably, sweetened, spiced and bound with egg and milk " more precideatlypumpkin" — the same mixture that goes into pumpkin pie, which appears in American print by 1796, in Amelia Simmons, and was itself descended from English spiced custards. Baking it without pastry made it cheaper and quicker, and putting the grated lemon rind in place of the usual ginger and nutmeg is a lighter, more custard-like treatment than the pie version. The instruction to serve it very cold marks it as a supper or dessert dish rather than a vegetable side, which is where the same purée would have appeared the day before.