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Pumpkin Butter
Take the seeds out of one pumpkin, cut in small pieces and boil soft; take three other pumpkins, cut them in pieces and boil them soft, put them in a coarse bag and press out juice; add juice to first pumpkin, and let boil ten hours or more, to become of the thickness of butter; stir often. If the pumpkins are frozen, the juice will come out much easier.
This is a sugarless fruit butter: three pumpkins are sacrificed for their juice, which is boiled down to concentrate the natural sugars of a fourth. The whole method hinges on reduction, so plan for a long, slow, well-watched day.
- The hinge: it thickens only by evaporationThe hinge: it thickens mainly by evaporation -- There is no added sugar or acid, and little effective set from pectin. Almost all the body comes from driving off water, which is why the original asks for ten hours. Use the widest heavy pan you own and keep the heat low; a narrow pot will take considerably longer.
- Scorching is the real riskAs the mass thickens it will catch and burn on the bottom long before it looks dry, and scorched pumpkin ruins the whole batch. Stir down to the pan bottom every few minutes in the last two hours, or finish it uncovered in a 300F oven, stirring every 20 minutes.
- What kind of pumpkinA nineteenth-century field pumpkin was large -- often ten pounds or more -- and watery and mild. Four of them is an enormous quantity by modern standards. Scaled down, reckon on roughly 4 lb of flesh for the base and 12 lb for juicing, which should give something on the order of a pint or two of finished butter.
- Frozen pumpkin really does give more juiceThe advice is sound: freezing ruptures the cell walls, so the thawed flesh releases juice far more readily. If you are not working in November, a night in the freezer does the same job.
- The coarse bagA jelly bag, a doubled square of cheesecloth or a clean pillowcase in a colander. Press hard, or twist it; unlike jelly, cloudiness does not matter here at all.
- Storage, since the recipe gives noneUnsweetened pumpkin butter is low in acid and low in sugar, and it is not a preserve in the modern sense despite the chapter it sits in. Refrigerate it and use within a week, or freeze it in small containers. Pumpkin butter should not be water-bath canned; current guidance is that it cannot be safely processed at home at any density.
- SeasoningThe original is plain pumpkin, and it tastes like concentrated squash rather than pie filling. Cinnamon, ginger, a little cider vinegar or lemon juice at the end are all later additions, but they sharpen a butter that can otherwise read as flat.
Fruit butters were the frugal end of the preserving shelf: where jams and jellies demanded expensive refined sugar, a butter could be made by boiling fruit juice down until its own sugars concentrated and the paste kept for a while on its own account. Apple butter made this way was standard across the eastern United States, and pumpkin butter belongs to the same family, born of a crop that grew in every corn field and had to be used before it rotted. The Dixie Cook Book appeared in the 1880s, and recipes that extract sweetness from the vegetable itself belong to that habit of mind. The trick of freezing the pumpkins first might suggest othing more than a guess that the work was done late in the season, after the first hard frosts, when the fields were being cleared anyway.