Home › A Calendar of Dinners › November 26
November 26
Menu: Bisque of Oyster; Broiled Smelts, Drawn Butter; Roast Turkey, Cranberry Sauce; Mashed Potatoes; Stewed Celery; Romaine Salad; Roquefort Cheese; Hot Pumpkin Pie; Orange Ice; Coffee Hot Pumpkin Pie-Line pie tin with Crisco Pastry. Mix 2 cups steamed and strained pumpkin, with 2 teaspoons Crisco, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon each cinnamon, cloves, mace, allspice, and ginger, grated rind of 1 lemon, 1 cup
This entry comes from a day-by-day dinner calendar, and the text breaks off mid-sentence at the page turn — the filling is missing its liquid, its eggs and any baking instruction. What survives is still enough to work from, with the gaps filled by standard custard-pie practice.
- The recipe is truncatedIt ends at "1 cup" — almost certainly milk or thin cream, and a pumpkin filling of this size in period books normally takes 2 to 3 eggs as well. Treat the printed text as a spice and sweetening formula rather than a complete method.
- "Line pie tin with Crisco Pastry"This is a single-crust pie: the pastry is laid into the tin and the filling poured in raw. Crisco pastry is a straight shortening crust, roughly 3 parts flour to 1 part shortening by volume, with ice water; it takes less water than a butter crust and toughens quickly if worked.
- Steamed and strained pumpkinFresh pumpkin steamed until soft and pushed through a sieve. Canned solid-pack pumpkin (not pie filling, which is already sweetened and spiced) substitutes cup for cup, but drain it in a sieve for 15 minutes if it looks wet, or the custard will weep.
- The spicing is very heavyTwo and a half teaspoons of ground spice to two cups of pumpkin, plus lemon rind, is more spice, and a wider range of it, than most modern pumpkin pies use. Cloves and mace dominate fast; halving the cloves and mace is reasonable if you want the pumpkin to read at all.
- MaceThe dried outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg seed, sold ground but easy to miss. Nutmeg is the nearest substitute, in about the same or a slightly smaller quantity, though it is sweeter and less peppery.
- Oven, since none is givenCustard pies want a hot start and a slow finish: 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then 350F for 35 to 45 minutes. It is done when the edge is set and the centre still wobbles as one mass; a fully firm centre means it is overbaked and will crack.
- The two teaspoons of Crisco in the fillingThis is enrichment, standing in for the butter an older receipt would have used. Melt it and stir it in with the liquid so it disperses rather than sitting in flecks.
- YieldTwo cups of pumpkin fills one deep 9-inch pie, serving six to eight. Serve warm, as the calendar directs, with coffee.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale — a hydrogenated cottonseed oil shortening pitched as a clean, odourless, all-purpose replacement for both butter and lard. Books of this kind were advertising in cookbook form, and the "Calendar of Dinners" material, which assigns a menu to every day of the year and is generally associated with P&G's later Crisco cookbook issued under that title, can be read as a demonstration that one tin could handle pastry, frying and cake alike. That this pie falls on November 27 is not accidental: the date sits squarely in Thanksgiving week, and pumpkin pie was by then the fixed American emblem of the holiday, its ancestry usually traced to the older English tradition of spiced, sweetened vegetable and fruit custards baked in a crust. The aggressive spicing here — cinnamon, cloves, mace, allspice and ginger all at once, with lemon rind — is closer to nineteenth-century practice than to the cinnamon-forward pie most people now expect.