Pumpkin Pie
Stew pumpkin, cut into small pieces, in a half pint water; and, when soft, mash with potato-masher very fine, let the water dry away, watching closely to prevent burning or scorching; for each pie take one well-beaten egg, half cup sugar, two table-spoons pumpkin, half pint rich milk (a little cream will improve it), a little salt; stir well together, and season with cinnamon or nutmeg; bake with under crust in a hot oven. Some steam pumpkin instead of stewing it.-Mrs. A. B. Morey.
A thin, custard-heavy pumpkin pie of the sort common in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, where the pumpkin is a flavoring rather than the body of the filling. The proportions are per single pie, so scale by the number of shells you are filling.
- The pumpkin quantity is not a typoThe pumpkin quantity may not be an error -- two tablespoons of pumpkin to half a pint of milk gives a pale, barely orange custard, not the dense filling of a modern pie, and thin custard-style pumpkin pies were made. If you want something closer to what people now expect, plan on about 1 to 1 1/2 cups of puree per 9-inch pie and increase egg and sugar accordingly, but understand that is a different pie from Mrs. Morey's.
- Half a pintOne cup. Half a pint of milk plus one egg and half a cup of sugar is roughly a single 9-inch shell filled shallow, or a smaller deep dish.
- "Hot oven"425-450F in period terms. For a custard that is too hot for the whole bake: start at 425F for the first 10-15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F and bake until the center is just barely wobbly, 30-40 minutes.
- "Under crust" onlyA bottom crust, no lid and no lattice. Blind-baking the shell 10 minutes before filling will spare you a soggy base, which the original recipe simply tolerates.
- Cooking down the pumpkinThe instruction to let the water dry away is the hinge. Wet puree makes a filling that weeps and never sets cleanly. Stir over low heat until it is thick enough to hold a mound on the spoon, then let it cool before adding egg.
- Which pumpkinField pumpkins bred for carving are watery and bland. Use a sugar or pie pumpkin, or a winter squash such as butternut or kabocha; most canned "pumpkin" is likewise a moschata-type squash rather than a carving pumpkin.
- "Rich milk"Whole milk at minimum; period milk was unhomogenized, and "rich" here signals milk that had not been skimmed. Substituting half-and-half for part of it does no violence to the recipe, and the author already recommends adding cream.
- SteamingThe alternative noted at the end is the easier method. Steamed or oven-roasted pumpkin takes on much less water, so there is less to boil off and less risk of scorching the mash.
Pumpkin pie in nineteenth-century America was often closer to a custard than to the thick spiced filling sold today, and this recipe shows the leaner proportions plainly: one egg, one cup of milk, and a spoonful or two of pumpkin for color and flavor. Cookbooks of the 1860s through 1880s frequently gave such formulas "for each pie," a convention that suited households baking several at a time for a holiday or a church supper. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from the same editorial stock as the widely reprinted Buckeye Cookery, was assembled largely from contributed recipes credited to named women, and the attribution to Mrs. A. B. Morey is typical of that practice. The choice between stewing and steaming, noted almost as an afterthought, mattered a great deal before canned puree became widely available, when a pie began with a whole squash and the cook's own judgment about how much water to drive off.