No. 727

Puree of Pumpkin

Puree de Courge

Peel and cut a pound of pumpkin into three-quarter inch squares; fry them in four ounces of butter, then moisten them to their height with some stock (No. 194a), adding salt and sugar, and when thoroughly done and reduced, mash them well with half a pint of allemande sauce (No. 407), pass through a sieve, return to the saucepan, heat well, and just before serving, stir in two ounces of fine butter.

← No. 726 Puree of Sweet Potatoes Garnishings No. 728 Puree of Sorrel →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French vegetable purée used as a garnish or bed for roast meat and game, not a pie filling. Two things decide whether it succeeds: how dry you get the pumpkin, and how gently you treat the finished sauce.

Do not let it boil once the allemande is inAllemande (No. 407) is velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Bring the combined purée back to a bare steam only; at a boil the yolks curdle and the smooth texture is gone for good.
Choose the right pumpkinA large field pumpkin is stringy and mostly water. Use a sugar pumpkin, kabocha or butternut; a pound peeled and seeded is roughly one small squash.
"Moisten to their height"Add stock just to the level of the cubes in the pan, not to cover. The intent is to braise them dry, and any excess liquid has to be cooked off again before mashing.
Reduce further than feels rightThe pumpkin should be soft and the pan nearly dry, catching slightly, before the sauce goes in. A wet purée cannot be rescued later without overcooking the egg liaison.
MeasuresHalf a pint is one cup of allemande. Four ounces of butter is one stick for frying, plus two ounces (half a stick) to finish. Salt and sugar are unspecified: a pinch of sugar is enough to lift the squash, not to sweeten it.
The sieveAlmost certainly a tamis, the standard tool of the period, worked with a wooden pestle; the recipe says only "pass through a sieve". A food mill on the fine plate or a drum sieve gives much the same result. A blender or processor will not give the same texture.
Finishing butterStir the last two ounces in off the heat, in pieces, just before it goes to the table. That is what gives the gloss, and reheating afterwards breaks it.
YieldAbout two cups, enough as a garnish for four to six. It is meant to accompany roast veal, poultry or game rather than stand alone.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of that operation, organised the way a professional brigade thought: purées sit in the garnishings chapter alongside sorrel, sweet potato and chestnut, as components to be built onto a plate rather than dishes in their own right. The construction here is entirely of the French school of the period, in which a vegetable is braised in butter and stock, bound with a mother sauce, forced through a tamis and mounted with cold butter at the last moment. Allemande, the egg-enriched velouté that binds it, was one of the standard sauces of the nineteenth century; Escoffier would later demote it to a derivative rather than a sauce of the first rank, which is part of why it has largely dropped out of home cooking. Courge covers squashes and gourds generally in French, and the American pumpkin was folded into that vocabulary without much fuss, appearing in a Manhattan restaurant kitchen dressed in wholly Parisian clothes.