Spiced Pumpkin Cream Pie
A seasonal riff on an American diner classic. Words by Chloe-Rose Crabtree. Photos by Georgia Rudd.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! This week’s columnist is Chloe-Rose Crabtree. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
Spiced Pumpkin Cream Pie
A seasonal riff on an American diner classic. Words by Chloe-Rose Crabtree. Photos by Georgia Rudd.
While in the UK it is fairly common to pour custard over a dessert, in the US there is a whole subcategory of pies filled with flavoured pastry cream or custard – or cream pies as we like to call them. Coconut, chocolate, and banana are the classic cream pies and for me instantly drum up images of bottomless cups of coffee in twenty-four-hour diners, which favour this type of pie because they can be kept in the fridge without going too soggy or weepy (unlike fruit pies, which we will tackle in my next column). This also makes them great desserts to bring to an event or to keep in the fridge to snack on all week.
Cream pies initially became popular after the invention of instant pudding mixes at the tail end of the 19th century. To popularise their products, brands like Jell-O flooded the market with cookbooks and recipe pamphlets guiding consumers on how to use these new convenience products to make parfaits, enrich cake mixes, and fill pies. The other component of the cream pie, the graham cracker, was made with molasses and a coarsely ground wholemeal flour and was originally intended to curb masturbatory compulsions as part of a soul-purifying diet popularised by the preacher Sylvester Graham in the late nineteenth century. Their blandness was believed to stave off any unwanted excitement – but ironically also made graham crackers the perfect base for a pie crust.
Mass-produced pudding mixes and graham crackers were a boon to white middle-class housewives in the twentieth century who found themselves expected to project an image of graceful domesticity but without the staff their mothers or grandmothers would have employed. The skill and time required to make flaky pastry or cook a custard without curdling became less of a concern, with cream pies instead often touted as ‘effortless’ or ‘magic’ in magazines.
In this recipe for pumpkin cream pie, I split the difference by filling my digestive biscuit crust with a homemade custard (I use digestives as graham crackers are hard to find in the UK). The flavours are inspired by Calabazas en Tacha, spiced caramelised pumpkin pieces usually served with their stewing juices and a splash of milk during Dia de Los Muertos celebrations. The flavours are not unlike a classic pumpkin pie, but this version has a more caramelised flavour from the brown sugar and roasted pumpkin purée, as well as a distinct clove spice with a hint of orange.
The custard filling is cooked on the stovetop and thickened with starch, which is great if you don’t have a reliable oven. This pie requires a fair amount of cooling and setting time, so I suggest making it the day before you want to serve and eat it. As usual, in the notes section I will provide ways to customise this recipe.
Spiced Pumpkin Cream Pie
