Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Pumpkin Pie
Pumpkin Pie
Mrs. Carson.
One quart of strained pumpkins, two quarts rich milk, one teaspoon of salt and two of ginger cooked with the pumpkins; six well beaten eggs, and one and a-half teacups of sugar.
A contributor's shorthand: no crust, no oven, no baking time. What it gives you is a ratio, and that ratio is the thing to look at before you start.
- The custard is very thin as writtenOne quart of pumpkin to two quarts of milk with only six eggs is far looser than a modern pumpkin pie, which runs closer to equal volumes of puree and dairy. Halving the milk to one quart, or adding two or three more eggs, gives a filling that sets cleanly instead of weeping.
- YieldThe full quantity is well over three quarts of filling, enough for about four 9-inch pies. Scale to a quarter of the recipe for a single pie.
- "Strained pumpkins"Field pumpkin stewed until soft and pushed through a sieve. Canned pumpkin puree (not pie filling, which is already sweetened and spiced) is the direct equivalent, one 15-oz can per scant two cups. Fresh puree from a roasted sugar pumpkin should be drained or cooked down first or the pie will be watery.
- "Rich milk"In the 1870s this generally meant unhomogenized whole milk with the cream still in it. Use whole milk with a third of it replaced by heavy cream, or evaporated milk, to get the same body.
- Cook the ginger with the pumpkinThe instruction is deliberate and worth following. Two teaspoons of dried ginger simmered into the puree loses its raw, dusty edge, which matters when ginger is the only spice in the pie.
- OvenNone is given. Bake in a partially blind-baked shell at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then reduce to 350F for 35 to 45 minutes. The center should still wobble slightly when the pie comes out; it firms as it cools.
- SugarA teacup of the period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the measure was not standardised; on that basis one and a half teacups is roughly 1 1/8 cups for the whole batch, or a little under 1/3 cup per pie. That is restrained by modern standards and suits the plain ginger flavoring.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago; first published 1874, with further editions later in the decade) was compiled from recipes contributed by named local women, with proceeds going to the Home for the Friendless, and Mrs. Carson's pumpkin pie is typical of the form: an ingredient list handed between cooks who already knew how to line a pie plate and judge an oven. The spicing is worth noting. Ginger alone, without cinnamon, nutmeg or cloves, is not unusual in nineteenth-century American pumpkin pie recipes, and the heavy "pumpkin pie spice" blend most people now expect is a later commercial convention. The dish is generally traced back to English pompion pies of the seventeenth century, though those were not always custards in pastry, and it was in New England that pumpkin became the standard filling and the pie fixed itself to the autumn table.