No. 3203

Pumpkin Pie

Tarte aux Courges

Cut one pound of very ripe pumpkin into slices; suppress the seeds and peel; cut it up into dice and put these pieces in a saucepan with some water to cook over a brisk fire; then drain and press the pulp through a sieve. Pour this into a vessel, add to it four eggs, a pinch of ginger, a pinch of cinnamon, a small pinch of nutmeg, one ounce of melted butter and half a pint of milk; stir well. Use this preparation for filling three-quarters full a pie plate lined the same as for a cocoanut pie (No. 3200); push it carefully into a hot oven and finish filling with a dipper. Cook forty to fifty minutes.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's pumpkin pie is a plain custard tart: cooked pumpkin, eggs, milk, spice, baked in a lined plate. A few of his conventions need translating before it will behave.

No sugar is listedThe ingredient list as printed contains none. Whether this is an omission or deliberate restraint is impossible to say from the text; a custard of this size would take something in the region of 1/2 to 3/4 cup of sugar to suit modern taste.
Quantities in modern termsHalf a pint is one cup of milk; one ounce of butter is two tablespoons. One pound of raw pumpkin, once seeded, peeled, boiled and pressed, yields something in the region of a cup to a cup and a quarter of puree — rather less than one standard can, if you would rather not cut up a squash.
Drain the pulp hardBoiled pumpkin holds a great deal of water, and the recipe's instruction to drain and press is the hinge of the dish. Wet puree gives a custard that weeps and a crust that goes to paste. Let it steam dry in the pan for a minute after draining, then sieve.
"A hot oven"The book gives no figures; a hot oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 425-450F. Starting hot sets the crust, but a full 40-50 minutes at that heat will curdle an egg-and-milk custard, so it is worth dropping to about 350F once the pastry has taken colour.
Filling it in the ovenRanhofer fills the shell three-quarters full, slides it onto the rack, and tops it up with a dipper — a working method for avoiding spills on the way to the oven, and still the easiest way to fill a shell to the brim.
When it is doneThe centre should still wobble as a unit when the plate is nudged; a custard baked until the middle is firm has already overcooked at the edges. About 175F at the centre. It sets further as it cools.
YieldEnough for one pie plate; a 9-inch plate gives eight modest slices, though the book does not specify a size. It sits among the cold entremets, which suggests it was served cool rather than warm from the oven.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a compendium of the restaurant's repertoire, and its French headings sit oddly over some very American dishes. Tarte aux courges is one of them: a New England farmhouse pie given a French title and filed with the creams and charlottes. Pumpkin custard baked in a crust is documented in English and American cookery from the seventeenth century onward, generally as a way of using a cheap, abundant field crop, and the spice combination here — ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg — was already standard by Ranhofer's day. What is unusual is how spare his version is: no molasses, no brandy, no cream, no sugar in the printed text at all, where contemporaries such as Fannie Farmer and the Buckeye cookbooks are considerably richer. Whether that reflects a Delmonico's preference for a lighter custard or simply a compositor's slip, the book does not say.