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Filling for Pumpkin Pie
Mix one cupful each of milk and dry steamed and sifted pumpkin, half cupful of sugar, two tablespoonfuls each of molasses and melted butter, one tablespoonful of ginger, two eggs slightly beaten, one teaspoonful of cinnamon and half teaspoonful of salt. Pour into a pastry-lined plate and bake in a moderate oven for forty-five minutes. When cold, slip from this plate.
A lean, molasses-sweetened custard pie from the era before canned pumpkin standardized the filling. Two things need attention before you start: the pumpkin must be dry, and the ginger is very assertive by modern standards.
- "Dry steamed and sifted pumpkin"Steaming rather than boiling keeps water out of the pulp, which is then pressed through a sieve. Canned solid-pack pumpkin (not pie filling, which is pre-sweetened and spiced) is the direct substitute; if you cook your own, drain it in a cloth or dry it in a low pan until it holds a shape on the spoon. Wet pumpkin is the usual reason this filling weeps or fails to set.
- A tablespoon of gingerThat is two to three times what most current pumpkin pies carry, and with only half a cup of sugar behind it the result is sharply hot. If you want the period flavor, keep it; if you want something closer to a familiar pie, one to two teaspoons is more usual. Ground spice of the period may also have been less potent than what you buy now.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F (period usage ranges roughly 350-375F). Start it hotter if you like a crisper crust bottom, 425F for the first 10 minutes and then down to 350F, but the total time stays about the same.
- Doneness, not clock timeForty-five minutes is about right for a shallow 8- to 9-inch pie, but judge by the filling: the outer inch set, the center still trembling slightly when the plate is nudged. A knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean. Carryover heat finishes the middle as it cools.
- YieldOne cup of pumpkin and one of milk make a thin filling for a 9-inch shell, or a properly full 8-inch one. Six modest slices. Double it for a deep-dish pie and add 15 to 20 minutes.
- "Slip from this plate"Most likely the pie was baked in a tin or enamel plate and then transferred, cold and fully set, to a serving dish for the table. There is no need to do this; if you try it, use a wide spatula and a chilled pie, and expect the crust edge to be fragile.
- MolassesUnsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate. It is doing double duty here as sweetener and as the source of the dark color the recipe expects.
Pumpkin custard baked in a crust is one of the oldest continuously made American sweets, and by the time of the Twentieth Century Cook Book it had settled into the form we know: squash or pumpkin pulp, milk, eggs, spice, and a sweetener split between refined sugar and molasses. The split is the period detail worth noticing: molasses was a cheap sweetener in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American kitchen and it lingered in pumpkin pie after white sugar became affordable. The phrasing "dry steamed and sifted" suggests a cook working from a whole field pumpkin, cut, steamed, and pushed through a sieve by hand; commercially canned pumpkin existed by this date, though how far it had displaced homemade pulp cannot be judged from the recipe. Note also that the book files this as a filling rather than a pie, leaving the pastry to a separate recipe.