Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Squash Pie
Squash Pie
Mrs. P. B. Ayer.
One crust, one small cup of dry maple sugar dissolved in a little water, two cups of strained squash stirred in the sugar; add four eggs, two teaspoons of allspice, two cups of milk, one teaspoon of butter, and two of ginger. added last. This makes two pies.
A plain squash custard pie sweetened with maple rather than molasses or white sugar. The instructions assume you already know how to bake a custard pie, so the missing pieces are oven heat, timing, and how wet the squash should be.
- The hinge: drain the squash"Strained squash" means cooked winter squash pushed through a sieve, and it should be dry enough to hold a shape on a spoon. Watery squash gives a filling that weeps and never sets cleanly; let the puree sit in a sieve or cook it down in a dry pan first.
- One crustThis is a bottom crust only, no lid. Two 9-inch shells for the full quantity, or the filling will overflow one pan. Blind-baking the shells briefly keeps the base from going soggy under a wet custard.
- Maple sugarDry maple sugar is granulated hard maple sugar, still sold by maple producers. "One small cup" is not a fixed measure; treat it as something under a level cup, perhaps 5 to 6 oz. Maple syrup can stand in at roughly 3/4 cup by the usual modern rule, in which case cut the milk back by a few tablespoons to keep the custard firm.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Start at 425F for 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes.
- When it is doneThe centre should still wobble slightly and read around 175F; if the middle is already fully firm in the oven the custard has likely gone too far, and it will tend to weep and turn grainy. It finishes setting as it cools.
- The butterOne teaspoon across two pies is a token amount. Melt it and stir it in with the milk rather than dropping it in cold.
- SpicingTwo teaspoons each of allspice and ginger across two pies works out at one of each per pie, and there is no cinnamon or nutmeg at all. Allspice and ginger alone read sharper and more peppery than a supermarket pumpkin pie; reduce if that is not what you want.
- YieldTwo 9-inch pies, six to eight slices each. Refrigerate leftovers, as this is an egg-and-milk custard.
Squash pie and pumpkin pie were effectively the same dish in nineteenth-century New England kitchens, and cookbooks of the period often treat the two words as interchangeable; dense-fleshed winter squash was frequently preferred because it made a drier, less stringy puree. What marks this version is the maple sugar. Before cane sugar became cheap and universal in the later nineteenth century, hard maple sugar was one of the common sweeteners across northern New England, Quebec and the upper Midwest, alongside molasses, and was sold in cakes and grated or dissolved as needed. Community cookbooks like this one gathered such recipes under contributors' names, which is why the quantities read like a note passed between neighbours who already knew what a squash pie looked like coming out of the oven.