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Pumpkin Pie
Neatly peel and trim a two-and-a-half-pound piece very sound pumpkin and cut it into small pieces. Plunge into three pints boiling water. Cover the pan and boil for twenty-five minutes. Drain well and press through a sieve into a bowl. Add three tablespoons powdered sugar, a saltspoon grated cinnamon, two egg yolks, half saltspoon grated nutmeg and half ounce butter; briskly mix with a wooden spoon for five minutes, then proceed to make the pie
This is a filling formula only — the pie shell and the baking are left to the cook, as was common in books written for people who already knew how to line a pie plate. A few things need translating before it works on a modern range.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the filling takes 1/4 tsp cinnamon and 1/8 tsp nutmeg — restrained by current standards, where a teaspoon or more of mixed spice is usual.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered sugar" means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Use ordinary granulated. Three tablespoons is also very little for the volume of pumpkin; most modern palates will want two to three times that.
- Half ounce butterOne tablespoon.
- The hinge: drain harder than you thinkTwo and a half pounds of pumpkin boiled in three pints of water absorbs a great deal of it. Press the pulp through the sieve, then let it drain in the sieve or a cloth until it stops weeping, and cook it down in a dry pan if it is still slack. A wet purée gives a filling that never sets and a soggy bottom crust.
- Roasting instead of boilingHalving the pumpkin and roasting it cut side down at 375F until collapsing gives a drier, sweeter pulp with no draining problem. Boiling is what this recipe calls for, but it is not the only period method, and it is not the one that produces the drier pulp.
- Choice of pumpkin"Very sound pumpkin" means a dense cooking variety — sugar pie, cheese, kabocha, or similar. A large field pumpkin grown for carving is watery and stringy and will not reduce to anything worth baking. The two-and-a-half-pound piece, weighed before peeling and trimming, should give roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of drained purée.
- No liquid, no setThere is no milk, cream or evaporated milk here and only two yolks, so this is a dense, almost paste-like filling rather than the custard most people expect. If you want a custard pie, count on about a cup of cream or evaporated milk and a third egg, and expect the spicing to need doubling to carry through it.
- BakingWith no oven directions given: bake in an unbaked shell at 425F for 15 minutes, then 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the centre is set with only a slight wobble. Fills one 9-inch pie, eight servings.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, written by a man who spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, chiefly as manager and steward, and something of that professionalism shows in the handling: the pumpkin is peeled, trimmed, boiled, sieved and beaten for five minutes with a wooden spoon, which is a restaurant cook's way with a purée rather than a farmhouse one. Pumpkin pie itself is much older than the book — English and colonial cooks were baking pumpion pies by the seventeenth century, though these were often layered with apples and spices rather than set as custards, and the dish had become firmly attached to the American Thanksgiving table by the middle of the nineteenth. What is notable in Filippini's version is how spare it is: three tablespoons of sugar, a pinch each of cinnamon and nutmeg, no molasses, no ginger, no cream. That an American pie should be set down at all tells you something too — by 1906 it could be presented to readers alongside the French and Italian dishes, worth recording for its own sake.