Pumpkin Pie (Made With Carrots): or, Autumn-flavored deception

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are warping unsuspecting housemates' minds!

These taste just like pumpkin. Carrot Tarts       Filling: ⅔ cup cooked and cooled carrots (firmly press and squish them into the measuring cup to measure)* ⅔ cup milk 1 egg ⅓ cup white sugar 2 tsp dark brown sugar ¾ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp cloves ¼ tsp salt ¼ tsp ginger       Pie crusts: 1 cup flour ⅓ cup butter pinch salt Water to form a dough       To make the crusts: Make the pie crust dough and form into 1½-inch balls. Let rest in the refrigerator for at least thirty minutes. Then roll each one out and press into a cupcake pan. (You should have at least ten.) Refrigerate the empty tart shells for at least thirty minutes. Then bake at 350° until the just barely start to turn golden. Allow to cool. Then gently loosen and remove each one, and set it back into the pan. (This ensures that the crusts don't stick to the pan).       To make the filling: Heat oven to 375°. Place the carrots and the milk into a blender, and thoroughly liquefy. Add the egg, and blenderize until completely mixed. In a medium bowl, mix the sugar, salt, and spices. Be sure to break up any spice-clumps. Then pour in the blenderized carrots, and mix thoroughly. (If you have a large enough blender, you can simply add the sugar and spices and then blenderize everything some more.) Pour into the pie shells, filling them almost to the top. Bake for 10 minutes. Then reduce the oven temperature to 325° and bake 25 more minutes. Serve with whipped cream or nuts. *You can boil or steam the carrots, but I suggest you microwave them instead. Cut them small enough that they fit inside a small bowl, add a spoonful of water, and cover with a wet paper towel. Microwave until fork-tender. Two carrots ended up being exactly the right amount for me, though results will vary depending on carrot size. Adapted from "Helping the Homemaker" by Louise Bennett Weaver, Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, October 28 1933 morning edition, p. 5

We at A Book of Cookrye are big fans of Betty Feezor, who had a cooking and housekeeping show in Charlotte, North Carolina from the fifties to the seventies. All of her ideas, recipes, and projects seem so feasible. 

There's not a whole lot of surviving episodes (or at least, very few have been taken out of the television station's archives and put online), but a fair number of short clips are floating around. In choosing her craft projects and recipes, she seemed to always keep in mind that her audience didn't have a lot of time to spend hand-embroidering anything. 

I really like how she doesn't pretend her creations always come out perfect. It's a refreshing change from the TV presenters who cheerfully make it look like you can effortlessly whip up a wedding dress with built-in corset and then hand-paint an impressionist mural on the accent wall in your living room. In the only complete episode of her show currently on YouTube, she brings out a dress she made that turned out too small, and shows how she fixed it.  She ends by saying "So don't despair, there's always a way that you can correct your mistake."

Apparently her show remains fondly remembered decades after it ended. In a recent video montage put up by her TV station, there's a short clip where she introduces her pumpkin pie recipe, saying "When we were first married, my husband and I tried to peel a pumpkin and cook it in little squares- and that's what lots of recipe books tell you to do. But they're so hard to cut. He had to do most of the peeling, and I tried to do some of the cutting and of course cut my hand as well as the pumpkin." She then suggests that you cut the pumpkin in half and bake it cut-side down in a pan of water. That way you only have to make a single cut through the raw pumpkin instead of spending forever hacking it into small pieces.

After telling us how to cook a pumpkin without the need for a husband or a first-aid kit, she goes on to give the advice that inspires today's recipe: "Now, you can use pumpkin, carrots, and squash interchangeably. And unless you tell the people that you're feeding what it is, they probably won't even know."

We unfortunately have a surplus of carrots in the refrigerator. and I was more than willing to turn them into a pie. Instead of getting out a potato masher, I decided to do this the modern way. (As a side note, you can tell I've gotten blissfully used to having a dishwasher because I fearlessly use the blender, food processor, spice grinder, and other appliances that would be a real pain in the pumpkin to wash by hand.)

Of course, substituting carrots for pumpkin is a very old cooking tip. I see it mentioned in cookbooks and household hints from practically every decade, but I have always been a bit skeptical. After all, carrots taste nothing like pumpkin. But this time we saw the the idea from Betty Feezor, who surely wouldn't go on live TV and lie to the greater Charlotte metropolitan statistical area.

And so, I used Louise Bennett Weaver's pumpkin tart recipe (which you may recall that I digitally clipped from the newspaper before the free trial ended) because it turned out so good last time. Because the little pie crusts came out half-cooked when we last saw the recipe, I baked them until they barely started to change color before putting any pie filling in them. This worked just as well as I hoped. Our tarts had crisp, fully-baked crusts.

The pie filling made with carrots was a lot thicker than the same recipe made with pumpkin. Those who saw the previous pumpkin tarts may remember that the pie filling was so watery that I could stir it into iced coffee (Which, assuming you have no reason to be leery of raw eggs, I highly recommend).

Aside from having to first cook and then blenderize the carrots, these were just as easy as the pumpkin tarts that contained actual pumpkin. One merely needs to dump everything into a bowl, stir it for a few seconds, then pour the resulting I-can't-believe-it's-not-pumpkin into the pie shells.

As they baked, our carrot tarts smelled just like pumpkin tarts. They also looked just like pumpkin tarts. And when they were done, they puffed up just like pumpkin tarts.

As the not-pumpkin tarts cooled, they fell back to their previous height. Most of them looked suspiciously perfect, though in full disclosure one or two of them cracked as they slowly deflated. But such aesthetic failures are why we have canned whipped cream.

But the real question, of course, is how did they taste? I served these without telling anyone of my surreptitious use of carrots, and no one suspected a thing. In fact, a few people came back for seconds without suspecting anything fishy about the, ahem, "pumpkin" tarts.

However, great consternation ensued when I told everyone the secret ingredient. Disbelief came first. "You mean these are carrots?" Unexpected dramatics immediately followed. "My entire perception of reality is bending! What even is pumpkin?" But at least if reality was bending, we had whipped cream to put on top.

 

In conclusion, and I barely believe it despite tasting the evidence, you really can substitute carrots for pumpkin in your pies. No one will know unless you serve the pumpkin and "pumpkin" pies side-by-side--- and even then, they may remain in pumpkin-spice ignorance. The carrots will help you see better, but you will never see that you were deceived.