America's Oldest Pumpkin Pie Recipe?

You often hear the saying "As American as apple pie," but as Thanksgiving draws near pumpkin pie looms ever larger in the national consciousness.

Pumpkins originated here in North America, but even before our continent was permanently colonized by Europeans they brought pumpkins back to the Old World and started baking pies. These European pumpkin pies were quite different from the ones we consume today. Recipes from seventeenth century England involve slicing and frying the pumpkin in a batter of eggs and sugar, and then layering the slices with apples and currants in a pastry shell. Your guests would be very confused if you served that to them this Thanksgiving.

Pumpkin pie went out of style in England, and at first it seemed it would do the same in New England. In 1650, Edward Johnson wrote happily in his book Wonder Working Providence of Sions Savior in New England that colonists were making more pies from traditional European fruits like apples and quinces instead of "their former Pumpkin Pies." For Edward Johnson pumpkin pie was a low-class, tacky dessert and it was good that it was slowly disappearing.

Luckily for us it didn't. Pumpkins grow well in New England and were a dependable food source for the English. A ballad called "New England's Annoyances" praises the humble gourd:

If flesh meat be wanting to fill up our dish, 

We have carrets and pumpkins and turnips and fish...

...Instead of pottage and puddings and custards and pies,

Our pumkins and parsnips are common supplies;

We have pumkin at morning and pumkin at noon,

If it was not for pumkin we should be undoon.

The earliest known American pumpkin pie recipe is one that was written down by Anne Gibbons Gardiner of Boston in the 1700s. It was very similar to the old English recipes, and involved layering sliced pumpkin with apples. The Gardiners sympathized with the British during the Revolution and fled to England, taking their pie recipe with them. They later returned to New England and lived in Maine, but Mrs. Gardiner's recipes weren't published until the 1930s.

The first published pumpkin pie recipes appears in Amelia Simmons's book American Cookery, which was printed in Connecticut in 1796. Her two recipes are very similar to modern ones. The old-fashioned layered pumpkin slices have been replaced by the pumpkin custard we're familiar with today:

No. 1. One quart (pompkin) stewed and strained, 3 pints cream, 9 beaten eggs, sugar, mace, nutmeg, ginger, laid into paste No. 7 or 3, and with a dough spur, cross and chequer, and baked in dishes three quarters of an hour.

No. 2. One quart of milk, 1 pint pompkin, 4 eggs, molasses, allspice and ginger in a crust, bake 1 hour.

The big difference between her recipes and contemporary ones is that she tops the pie with a lattice crust. Most modern modern cooks omit a top crust. Still, I think you could follow her recipe and safely serve it to your guests this Thanksgiving for a historically authentic yet delicious dessert.

I found this information in James Baker's Thanksgving. The Biography of an American Holiday and Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's America's Founding Food. The Story of New England Cooking. 

How Tough Is Your Indian Pudding?

As some of you might know, I’m a big fan of Indian pudding. I can’t get enough of that spicy/sweet/mealy dessert!

If you don’t know what Indian pudding is and are embarrassed to ask, it’s a Colonial-era pudding made from corn meal, molasses, spices, salt, milk and usually eggs. It's named Indian pudding because the Puritans called corn meal “Indian meal.”

A post I wrote two years ago still gets lots of hits, so clearly there are other fans of Indian pudding out there. Rejoice, Indian pudding fans. Today’s post is for you!

Harriet Beecher Stowe is best known as an abolitionist and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but this Connecticut native wrote several other novels. Some of them contain interesting pieces of New England folklore. For example, her 1859 novel The Minister’s Wooing is set in Newport, Rhode Island and contains this cryptic piece of dialogue. It’s uttered by a young woman discussing her skills as a potential wife:

“I’ve been practicing on my pudding now these six years, and I shouldn’t be afraid to throw one up chimney with any girl.”

I like how she says “up chimney”, rather than “up the chimney.” It reminds me of when I was a kid and I’d ask my mother where Dad was. Ninety percent of the time her answer was “Down cellar!”, which is a New England way of saying down in the basement.

Watch out for the pudding! Photo from a site about the history of chimneys.

However, I wasn’t alive in 1859 so I don’t understand why girls would be throwing puddings up the chimney. Well, according to Mrs. Stowe there was a tradition that “no young lady was fit to be married till she could construct a boiled Indian-pudding of such consistency that it could be thrown up chimney and come down on the ground, outside, without breaking.” The Minister’s Wooing is actually set in the 1790s, so Stowe is describing something that was probably told to her by her parents or grandparents.

Was this an actual tradition, or did someone pull a fast one on Harriet? I might say she’s the one pulling a hoax on her readers, but that seems unlikely because she seems very sincere in her devotion to Indian pudding. At one point in the novel she rhapsodizes about its “gelatinous softness, matured by long and patient brooding in the motherly old oven.” I don’t think someone who wrote that would knowingly lie to us!

On the other hand, that same softness she raves about would seem to preclude throwing it up and out a chimney. Wouldn’t it need to be really bouncy and tough to survive that? To settle this question, I’d ask my readers with fireplaces to give this a try. To make things easier, boil your pudding in a bag or maybe cheesecloth, like the characters in The Minister’s Wooing do. They don’t bake it in a dish. Perhaps that’s the secret to a bouncy pudding?

I wish I could say I unearthed this crazy factoid myself, but I actually read it in America’s Founding Food: the Story of New England Cooking by Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald. It’s a great book!