Prepare pastry, line a 9-inch pie pan, and refrigerate while you make the filling. Combine pumpkin, sugar, spices, and salt in a mixing bowl. Then beat in milk, eggs, cream, and brandy with a rotary beater or an electric mixer. Pour into unbaked pastry shell and bake in a preheated 325° oven for 1 hour or until a knife inserted in center comes out dry. Cool. Serve plain, or with Cheddar cheese or whipped cream mixed with ginger (use 1 cup heavy cream and 2 tablespoons chopped crystallized ginger).
“Pumpkin pie,” according to The House Mother, “if rightly made, is a thing of beauty and a joy--while it lasts.... Pies that cut a little less firm than a pine board, and those that run round your plate are alike to be avoided. Two inches deep is better than the thin plasters one sometimes sees, that look for all the world like pumpkin flap-jacks. The expressive phrase, “too thin”, must have come from these lean parodies on pumpkin pie. With the pastry light, tender, and not too rich, and a generous filling of smooth spiced sweetness - a little 'trembly' as to consistency, and delicately brown on top - a perfect pumpkin pie, eaten before the life has gone out of it, is one of the real additions made by American cookery to the good things of the world. For the first pumpkin pie of the season, flanked by a liberal cut of creamy cheese, we prefer to sit down, as the French gourmand said about his turkey: “with just two of us; myself and the turkey!!”
- Pastry for a 1-crust pie
- 2 cups cooked pumpkin (fresh, canned, or frozen)
- 2/3 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
- 2 teaspoons cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 cup milk
- 2 eggs, well beaten
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 1/4 cup brandy