Pompkin

History

"Pompkin" sets down two formulas for a spiced pumpkin custard baked in pastry. The first folds a quart of stewed and strained pumpkin into three pints of cream and nine beaten eggs, seasons it with sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger, lays it into a paste crust scored across in a checker pattern with a dough spur, and bakes it three quarters of an hour; the second is a plainer version of a quart of milk, a pint of pumpkin, four eggs, molasses, allspice and ginger baked an hour in a crust. The pumpkin itself is a New World plant, native to North America, that reached Tudor England by way of France, where the flesh of the "pompion" was taken up as a pie filling. English cooks of the seventeenth century, though, handled it quite differently: their pumpkin pies browned the sliced flesh in a pan before baking it in a crust with butter, sugar and raisins, a method preserved in Hannah Woolley's receipts as one of the earliest for the dish. Woolley's own "Pumpion Pie" dipped the slices in beaten egg and herbs, fried them, and layered them into the crust with butter, currants, sugar, sack and sharp apples, making a fruit-and-spice pie rather than a smooth custard. Earlier American colonial "pies," by contrast, were more often a savory dish cooked and served inside a hollowed pumpkin than a sweetened custard in pastry. Against that background the stewed-and-strained, cream-bound, crust-baked treatment recorded here stands as an early printed appearance of the smooth custard pumpkin pie recognizable today, carried in the first cookbook written by an American. What the two receipts do not keep is where that custard treatment came from: whether the formula was devised here or was already a New England commonplace being printed for the first time, and the pages hold the method without holding the cook who first bound stewed pumpkin with cream and egg, or the table it was meant to reach.

Ingredients

• 1 quart stewed and strained pompkin
• 3 pints cream
• 9 beaten eggs
• sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger
• paste (No. 7 or 3)

Instructions

1. No. 1: Combine 1 quart stewed and strained pompkin, 3 pints cream, 9 beaten eggs, and sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger.
2. No. 1: Lay into paste No. 7 or 3, cross and chequer the top with a dough spur, and bake in dishes three quarters of an hour.
3. No. 2: Combine 1 quart milk, 1 pint pompkin, 4 eggs, molasses, allspice and ginger in a crust, and bake one hour.