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Pumpkin Pie
1 1/4 cups steamed pumpkin forced through a strainer 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon ginger 1/8 teaspoon cloves 1/2 teaspoon salt 7/8 cup milk + cup sugar teaspoon cinnamon teaspoon ginger teaspoon cloves teaspoon salt 1 slightly beaten egg cup milk Mix ingredients in order given. Bake in a pie tin lined with pastry in a hot oven 450°F. until the crust is set, then 350°F. 5 sour apples teaspoon salt cup sugar
The text here has come through badly: the fractions in front of every measurement have dropped out, the pumpkin itself is missing from the ingredient list, and the last line belongs to the apple pie that followed it on the page. What survives is still a usable outline of a standard early twentieth-century custard-style pumpkin pie, but the proportions have to be supplied from elsewhere.
- Missing quantitiesThe quantities have dropped out of this text (the stray "+" at the head of the list is where a fraction stood), and the pumpkin is missing from the ingredient list altogether. Do not guess your way through it as written; treat this as a record of the method rather than a working formula.
- What the proportions would have beenA pie of this type in the period ran roughly a cup and a half of cooked, strained pumpkin to a cup of milk and a half to two-thirds cup of sugar, with the spices measured in quarter and half teaspoons; the egg is one of the few quantities that survives here, given as one. Those are the ratios to check any reconstruction against.
- The two-stage ovenThis is the hinge of the recipe and the one part that is intact. The initial 450°F heat sets the crust before the wet custard can soak into it; dropping to 350°F afterwards lets the egg set slowly. Baked at one temperature throughout, the base is likelier to stay soggy and the custard to overcook and weep at the edges.
- Judging donenessThe book gives no second time. Expect 40 to 50 minutes at 350°F, and pull the pie when the outer two inches are set and the centre still moves as a single soft mass. It firms as it cools.
- Pumpkin then and now"Pumpkin" here means field pumpkin stewed and pressed through a sieve, which is wetter and stringier than canned purée. Canned solid-pack pumpkin substitutes directly and needs no draining; the pie filling labelled "pumpkin pie mix" is already sweetened and spiced and will not work with these amounts.
- The stray apple line"5 sour apples, teaspoon salt, cup sugar" is the opening of the recipe that followed on the page and has nothing to do with the pumpkin. Ignore it.
- YieldNo yield or pan size is given; a mixture of this size would fill one standard pie shell. The pastry is assumed rather than supplied here.
Pumpkin custard baked in a crust is a long-established American sweet, generally traced to English sweet vegetable and root puddings adapted to the squashes grown in New England. By the time this book appeared, the combination of pumpkin, milk, egg, sugar and warm spices was well settled. The Metropolitan Cook Book was distributed free by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to its policyholders, part of a broad early twentieth-century campaign that tied home economics and plain cooking to public health, and its recipes are correspondingly short, cheap and unfussy. The use of numbered oven temperatures alongside the older word "hot" is a small marker of its date: earlier books more often gave only terms such as "hot" and "moderate."