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32 i two j “TheTimesWherein OldPompionWasaSaint” From Pumpkin Beer to Pumpkin Pie, 1600 to 1799 W ith herbals in hand and little more than hope to guide them, those who took the leap and set off for North America were not fully prepared for the dramatic adjustments they would have to make upon their arrival. When the first En­ glish colonists landed on the continent’s shores in the early seventeenth century, they had a few mementos and provisions but otherwise little except cultural baggage to sustain them. It was not enough. In a land where native peoples thrived on a plentitude of plants and animals, many colonists suffered because they could not imagine eating the native pumpkins, corn, and shellfish. “Between human beings and foodstuffs in the natural environment,” the historian John Bennett wrote, “there exists a cultural screen, which modifies and controls the selection of available food.”1 Accustomedtoadietofdomesticatedmeatsandtheirby-products,along with European grains and root vegetables, the colonists were unfamiliar with and in some cases repulsed by the wild and cultivated products they encountered. They had both feet on the American continent, but their customs and worldviews were still firmly planted on the other side of the Atlantic .EdwardJohnsonnotedinthe1650sthat“awantofEn­ glishgraine,wheat, barley and Rie proved a sore affliction to some stomachs, who could not live upon Indian Bread and water, yet they were compelled to it till Cattle incr’d, and the plows could but go: instead of Apples and Pears, they had Pompkins and Squashes of divers kinds, their lonesome condition was very grievous to some, which was much aggravated by continual fear of Indians’ approach.”2 “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 33 The pumpkin’s colonial history offers a view of how early Americans thought about and made use of the new natural resources available to them and how they saw themselves in comparison with their Indian neighbors and their way of life back home. Rather than thinking of the pumpkin as merely something to eat, colonists made it a symbol of their identity, separate from that of the world they had left behind. The “lonesome condition” that Johnson identified with the pumpkin—survival in the wilderness and dependence on local resources—while a sign of desperation to Europeans, came to be a point of pride to the colonists. By the time of the Revolution, Americans had turned the pumpkin and pumpkin farming into meaningful emblems of American independence and cultural identity. But that transition in thinking was a long way off at the time of the first landings. Those initial months on the continent were chaotic for the En­ glish colonists. They lacked proper shelter, knowledge of the local environment, and the ability to obtain food. Without the Indians’ help, they would not have survived. John Smith recalled of the Virginia colony that “had the salvages not fed us, we directlie had starved.”3 Indians provided the new arrivals with meat, grain, and produce and taught them how to procure the same.4 Travelers commented on Indians’ hospitality, for their custom was to greet visitors with generous amounts of food. Indians made squash and pumpkin common components of their welcoming feasts, because the vegetables were readily available and perhaps also because they had special status as food items. From what is now upstate New York, the Dutchman Harmen Meyndertsz van Bogaert noted in the 1630s, “A woman came to meet us bringing us baked pumpkins to eat. . . . [We] ate heartily of pumpkins, beans and venison, so that we were not hungry, but were treated as well as is possible in their land.”5 The colonists did not always reciprocate. Edward Winslow’s account of the creation of the Plymouth colony described how, in the winter of 1620, settlers stole caches of corn that local Indians had buried for their own winter use.6 And William Bradford recalled in History of Plymouth Plantation, “Others fell to plaine stealing both night and day from ye Indians, of which they grievously complained.”7 The Pilgrims—and the Indians, judging from Winslow’s and Bradford ’s comments—had something to celebrate when the settlers produced their first successful harvest in the autumn of 1621. Although most 34 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” Americans commemorate the festivities as the first Thanksgiving in the land, the Pilgrims themselves would not have considered the occasion a Thanksgiving Day at all. Instead, they thought of the feasting and games as a harvest fête, and the antithesis of the way they observed Thanksgiving Day. In the Pilgrims’ time, Thanksgiving was a day of devotion and reflection on God’s benevolence during which merriment was specifically disallowed. People were more likely to fast than to feast.8 Church or civic leaders proclaimed public days of thanksgiving in response to particular events, such as a military victory, the safe passage of a ship, or the arrival of rain, and not on an annual basis or in connection with the fall harvest . The Pilgrims’ celebration was also hardly the first of its kind; many predated it. The Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado held a similar feast with local Indians in present-day Texas in 1541. The French Huguenots held a day of thanks after their safe arrival in Florida in 1564. And the En­ glish settlers at Jamestown held a solemn Thanksgiving commemorating their successful passage to Virginia in 1619. The commemoration of the Pilgrims’ celebration as the first Thanksgiving has less to with historic fact than with national mythologies created generations later. The En­ glish festival Harvest Home was a more likely progenitor of the Pilgrims’ event than Thanksgiving, although the chroniclers of the first Plymouth celebration made no mention of the customary Harvest Home parade and effigy figures. Pious Pilgrims might have deemed these rituals too pagan and sacrilegious to include in their event because of their preChristian roots. The Hebrew harvest festival known as Succot, or Festival of the Tabernacle, as described in the Pilgrims’ well-worn Bibles, also might have been their inspiration. But Bradford and his followers did not necessarily have to turn back to old sources brought from home. Their Indian neighbors, who charitably introduced the colonists to many new customs and goods, might have shared their harvest traditions as well. In any case, no one recorded anything about eating pumpkin at the feast, and pumpkin pie was not the celebrated finale of the Pilgrims’ “Thanksgiving ” holiday, as later stories would have it. Whether or not the Pilgrims served pumpkin that day for dinner, the vegetable was a ubiquitous part of colonial life. No evidence exists that colonists in the seventeenth century bred any new pumpkin varieties, but they defined them in new ways, altered their culinary uses, and ascribed new meanings to them. More than a hundred years after Europeans first “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 35 encountered the pumpkin, their descendants on both sides of the ocean still could not quite get a handle on how to categorize it. They indiscriminately called any and every form of squash a pompion. John Parkinson’s 1629 herbal Paradisi i Sole offers an example, defining a pompion as a “fruit, which is very great, sometimes of the bigness of a man’s body, and oftentimes lesse, in some ribbed or bunched, in others plaine, and either long or round, either green or yellow, or gray, as Nature listeth to shew herselfe ; for it is but waste time, to recite all the formes and colours may be observed in them.”9 Thomas Hariot, when he wrote that “several forms are of one taste and very good, and do also spring from one seed,” recognized the propensity of pumpkins, squashes, and gourds to produce different varieties on the same plant due to cross-pollination.10 The color orange, one of the most common physical traits by which Americans identify pumpkins today, played no part in colonial taxonomy. Sources are more likely to define pumpkins as green. John Gerarde’s 1633 herbal described the “great round pompion” as “oftentimes of a greener colour with an harder barke” than the “great oblong pompion.”11 In Joseph Tournefort’s 1719–30 The Compleat Herbal, the “common pumpkin [has] a hard and lignous Rind, of a green or dark green colour, spotted with white or striated and a soft, white and sweetish pulp, not altogether so insipid as a gourd.”12 One explanation could be that the green pompion was not an American pumpkin at all but a melon or cucumber. Another is that these writers described the fruit in its immature state, before it turned yellow or orange. Jean de La Quintinie’s 1699 The Compleat Gard’ner supports this assertion: “There are two sorts of Pumpions, the Green and Whitish, but neither of them are fit to be gather’d till they be grown Yellow and the skin becomes tough enough to resist ones nail.”13 The Count de Lahontan’s description of a vegetable “as big as our Melons; and their Pulp is as yellow as Saffron,” from around 1684, however, closely matches that of a field pumpkin.14 Great size, not color or shape, was the most noteworthy characteristic of pumpkins in this time period. Pumpkins, explained La Quintinie, “are the biggest Productions which the Earth brings forth in our climates.”15 John Josselyn referred to the watermelon as “a large fruit, but nothing near so big as a Pompion.”16 Underscoring its value for basic sustenance rather than for display, observers considered pumpkins remarkable not just for the size of their individual fruits, as many people do today, but also for 36 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” the quantity of fruits produced by a single plant. In A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia, Ralph Hamor noted that pumpkins “propagated in [such] abundance that a hundred were frequently observed to spring from one seed.”17 And Philip Miller wrote with awe in The Gardener’s Dictionary: “I have measured a single plant which had run upwards of 40 feet from the Hole, and had produced a great Number of side-Branches; so that if the plant had been encouraged, and all the side-Branches permitted to remain, I dare say it would have fairly overspread 20 Rods of Ground which, to some people, may seem like a Romance; yet I can affirm it to be fact.”18 Many of the native American food items cataloged by Edward Ward, an En­ glish traveler to New En­ gland in the late 1600s, which included “Fish, Fowl, Bear, Wild-cat, Raccoon, Deer, Oysters, Lobsters roasted or dry’d in Smoke . . . Ind-corn, Kidney beans boil’d, Earth-nuts, Chest-nuts, Lilly-roots, Pumpkins, Milions, [and] divers sorts of Berries,” would have been utterly foreign to the early European inhabitants.19 In New En­gland’s Plantation, Francis Higginson noted in 1630, “The countrie aboundeth naturally with store of good roots of great variety and good to eat. . . . Here are also store of pumpions, cowcumbers, and other things of that nature which I know not.”20 Until the settlers acquired ample stores of European seeds and livestock, they had to depend on these local resources or perish . Colonists did not eat some foods, however, such as the potato and the tomato, until they were first accepted in Europe. One culinary change that probably elated most settlers was their increase in meat consumption in the colonies. In Europe, wild game was beyond the reach of most people. Hunting wild animals was a privilege reserved for the aristocracy. In the American colonies, wild creatures were literally fair game to anyone who was a good shot. Since the pumpkin’s reputation in Europe was uninspired at best, the colonists might have eaten the vegetable less because they were fond of it than because it grew almost effortlessly and produced high yields. In his 1648 Good News from New En­ gland, Edward Winslow wrote that “pumpkins there hundreds are.” And a colonial song reportedly dating from 1630 expresses how extensively they were put to use: Instead of pottage and puddings and custards and pies Our pumpkins and parsnips are common supplies “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 37 We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon If it was not for pumpkin, we should be undone.21 In keeping with European culinary traditions, the typical way colonists prepared pumpkins or any other vegetables, even leafy greens, was to boil them down to a thick sauce called “porrage” or pudding, or to toss them into meat stews.22 Pumpkin pudding was similar to apple butter, although it was both savory and sweet. John Josselyn’s 1671 New-En­gland’s Rarities contains one of the oldest surviving pumpkin recipes, which he called “an ancient New En­ gland Standing Dish”: The Housewives’ manner is to slice them when ripe and cut them into dice, and so fill a pot of them of two or three gallons, and stew them upon a gentle fire for a whole day, and as they sink, they fill again with fresh Pompions, not putting any liquor to them; and when it is stew’d enough, it will looke like bak’d Apples; this they Dish, putting Butter to it, and a little Vinegar (with some Spice, and Ginger, Etc.) Which makes it tart like an Apple, and so serve it up with Fish or Flesh: It provokes Urin extremely and is very windy.23 The one-pot meal or stew was as common among colonists as among the Indians. Both dishes relied on similar technologies—an open fire and a cooking pot. Instead of the traditional wheat bread, cabbage, and onions that sustained them in Europe, many early colonists made do with Indian succotash, which, in the words of Ralph Hamor, who visited Virginia in 1615, was “a mess of boiled beans, maize, and pompions .”24 The versatile pumpkin could serve simultaneously as cooking vessel and entrée. Parkinson’s herbal noted that this method required the cook to “take out the inner watery substance with the seeds, and fill up the place with pippins [apples], and having laid on the cover which they cut off from the toppe, to take out the pulpe, they bake them together.”25 During his visit to New En­ gland, Edward Ward wrote rather condescendingly about the colonists’ great consumption of pumpkins in the early years of settlement. He commented, “Their provisions (till better acquainted with the Country) being only Pumkin, which they’d cook’d as many several ways, as you may Dress Venison: And is continued to this Day as a great dish amongst the En­ glish. Pumpkin Porrage 38 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” being as much in esteem with the New En­ gland Saints, as Jelly Broth with Old-En­ glish Sinners.”26 Most of the first colonists, even if skilled as merchants or craftsmen and aspiring to something more than a homestead in the woods, had to grow corn and pumpkins full-time until the colonies established dependable stores of food.27 In imitation of the Indians, colonists often planted pumpkins in cornfields. The vegetables were convenient and abundant by-products of the corn crop, the most important early colonial food commodity . John Winters, a Maine farmer, noted in the spring of 1634 that his five-acre farm was “all set with corn and pumpkins.”28 Settlers also planted pumpkins in kitchen gardens with other plants and herbs to use for home consumption instead of to sell in the marketplace. Initially, farming was a communal enterprise in both the North and the South. Colonial governments attempted to sustain communal economic systems, but private self-interest thwarted their success. Once the colonies were stable and the inhabitants beyond starvation, residents began seeking remuneration for moving to America. When prospects of gold vanished, they turned to animal and vegetable products for sources of wealth and gain. In the South, the original plan to have colonists contribute their crops to a communal repository failed. Land was opened up for private purchase and use, which led to the development of the largescale plantation economy. In some instances, Virginians barely produced enough food to sustain themselves, because profits from cash crops such as tobacco proved much more enticing.29 The northern colonies developed different landscape and economic patterns. They were colonized as religious and social utopias as well as profit-making enterprises. In the North, families broke up the original landschaft system, an old European town plan in which communal fields farmed for the common good surrounded a central town, because the settlers preferred to stake out claims of their own.30 Northern farms, unlike those in the South, remained small-scale, family-run operations because of poorer soil and climate and because settlement patterns remained more centrally controlled. New En­ glanders, however, were arguably no less interested in profit than their neighbors to the south.31 Remarkably, within a quarter century after their founding, the colonies prospered. By 1642, 15,000 acres were under tillage in Massachusetts, and 12,000 head of cattle were being raised.32 In Virginia, the population “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 39 soared from 2,500 in 1630 to more than 15,000 by 1642.33 Between 1650 and 1675, the En­ glish population in all the British colonies reached 110,000, whereas the combined population of Plymouth and Virginia in 1624 had been a mere 1,525.34 The rapid growth from both new immigration and native births created a ready market for farmers and traders. Colonies began to export goods. In the South, tobacco and rice brought the greatest returns. In the North, with its shorter and more inclement summers and less productive land than in the South, timber, livestock, and furs were of primary importance. Wheat was paramount in the middle colonies . The social and economic fabric of colonial life transformed as the opening up of international markets, improved mobility, and the increase in individual enterprises interconnected isolated rural enclaves.35 There was also more than enough to eat. Pork, beef, milk, wheat, peas, and barley were daily pleasures, no longer dreams of the hungry. Edward Ward wrote in 1699 that pumpkins “were the chief Fruit that supported the En­ glish at their first settling of these parts. But now they enjoy plenty of good Provisions.”36 The market that developed for other American crops never materialized for the pumpkin, and the vegetable is hard to find in colonial business accounts. A document titled “Manufacturer and Other Products Listed in the Rates on Imports and Exports Establish’d by the House of Parliament ,” dated June 24, 1660, notes the export of corn, beans, onions, and potatoes from the colonies, but no pumpkins.37 Robert Johnson’s Nova Britannia, a commodities report published in 1609, ignored native products altogether, listing only more familiar crops, such as oranges, almonds, and rice, introduced from Europe.38 The pumpkin’s cultural affiliations, not just its bland meat, undercut its popularity. Within a few decades of the founding of Jamestown and Plymouth, dining on native pumpkins instead of standard European fare was a sign of dire circumstances, the “lonesome condition” that colonist Edward Johnson mentioned in 1654.39 Instead of being a food of necessity, it became food for the poor, as it had been in Europe for some time. Europeans ridiculed the pumpkin and the people who ate it as boorish and crude, the antithesis of cultured society. The famous seventeenth-century herbalist John Gerarde called a pumpkin “food utterly unwholsome for such as live idlely; but unto robustious and rustick people nothing hurteth that filleth the belly.”40 The herbalist John Parkinson wrote that “the poore of the 40 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” Citie, as well as the Country people, doe eate thereof, as a dainty dish.”41 The melon and cucumber were “of much esteeme . . . with all the better sorts of persons; and the [pompion] is not wholly refused of any, although it serveth most usually for the meaner and poorer sort of people.”42 Many people thought of melons and pumpkins as markers not only of social classes but also of cultural differences between Europeans and American colonists. By accusing Puritans of having “pumpkin-blasted brains,” Nathaniel Ward, in his 1647 New En­ gland satire The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America, adapted the historic symbolism of Shakespeare’s FalstaffandArcimboldo’spumpkin-headedemperortoridiculethosewho had picked up and moved from old En­ gland to New.43 “Pumpkinhead” was a common term of ridicule for colonists.44 The lowly status of American pumpkin eaters was garnered, in part, from the colonies’ image as a cultural backwater. Many Europeans deemed America’s early immigrants to be misfits and social outcasts, among them the anarchistic Puritans and Quakers, who challenged social and religious order, and the inmates and roustabouts who were indentured servants and Virginia pioneers. After observing Americans’ great consumption of pumpkins during his travels, Edward Ward remarked sarcastically that Americans “have wonderful Appetites, and will Eat like Plough-men; tho very Lazy and Plough like Gentle-men. It being no rarity there, to see a Man Eat Till he sweats and work till he freezes.”45 People on both sides of the Atlantic identified the pumpkin with crude and unruly behavior and with unchecked human desires. When Pilgrims journeyed to North America to live among what they considered wild men and beasts, they offered proof of their faith and sacrifice. Yet they directed their fears not just toward external dangers but also toward threats from within. They worried that living alone in the wilds, beyond the order of society, might provoke the colonists’ wild natural desires and urges. Pious Pilgrims chastised someone who pursued earthly delights or passions rather than more godly and virtuous paths—who, for example, celebrated Thanksgiving with feasts and revelry instead of fasts and prayers—as a worshiper of “St. Pompion.”46 Calling someone a disciple of St. Pompion—a believer in a lowly, laughable vegetable—was also a means of degrading the Anglican dogma and faith. Two paintings offer visual evidence of the sort of untamed prospects a pompion conjured up for people living in the seventeenth century. “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 41 Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s 1645 Earth’s Fertility portrays the pumpkin as a symbol of both nature’s benevolence and its menace.47 In the painting, Ceres, the goddess of fertility or grain, holds a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables in one hand and, with the other, points to a cauliflower , an overripe and bursting melon, and, most prominently, a massive orange field pumpkin. The produce represents the natural wealth of the earth that nurtures and sustains humanity. Standing with one foot on the pumpkin, however, is one of several centaurs. The gesture symbolically links the vegetable to these half-men, half-beasts, which embody lust and primal natural drives. The centaurs—and by connection the pumpkin— represent decadence and debauchery, the tawdry side of nature and of people. Bambocciate (Childishness), an undated painting by the Italian artist Faustino Bocchi, pictures the pumpkin’s wild nature even more dramatically .48 The painting is reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch’s work in its portrayal of tiny figures in chaotic mayhem. Bocchi depicts dozens of wild little creatures fighting with abandon in a gruesome battle. Central to the frenzied scene is a towering pumpkin fortress. Some dwarfs scale ladders to its carved-out windows, others rush its rounded doorway, and one dwarf sits triumphantly atop its stem. By making the pumpkin the object of these beastly little nymphs’ desires and conquests, Bocchi imbues the vegetable with the qualities of their world, which is disorderly, unruly, and uncivilized. Both images resonate with the feral qualities of “St. Pompion ” and with the popular vision of the pumpkin’s native land as, in the words of William Bradford, a “howling wilderness.” “The whole countrie ,” he said, “full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.”49 St. Pompion might call to mind a jack-o’-lantern to readers now, but the pumpkin’s transformation into the Halloween totem lay many years in the future. Evidence of colonial Halloween celebrations is scant, although Halloween was a fixture on the annual calendar in many parts of Europe. Known as All Hallow’s Eve, the holiday blended the traditions of the ancient Celtic festivities called Samhain, signifying the onset of winter, and the Catholic holidays of All Souls Day and All Saints Day, dating from the ninth century.50 All Hallow’s Eve, or October 31, marked the time when supernatural spirits and ghosts wandered about. During the festivities, participants set bonfires to ward off the evil spirits and offered 42 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” gifts of food to placate them. In Europe, instead of pumpkins, people displayed hollowed-out turnips lit by candles from within to signify souls lost in purgatory. The holiday was a time of misrule, masquerades, and pranks, when omens were at their most powerful. By the time of the Plymouth landing, the revelry characteristic of Halloween had fused with that of Guy Fawkes Day, a holiday celebrating the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the British Parliament on November 5, 1605, and, more generally, the Protestant takeover of Catholicism in En­ gland, shifting the holiday toward secular rather than occult or religious meanings. Catholic colonists of Maryland and Anglican colonists of the South recognized All Hallow’s Eve in their church calendars, but the Puritans in the North abhorred both the pagan ritual and Catholic rites as violations of their Calvinist principles.51 Belief in an active spirit world and the supernatural, however, never lost their hold on New En­ glanders’ imaginations . The Salem witch trials are the most famous example, but every colony had statutes to punish practitioners of magic, and most farmers used astrological charts to guide their planting, plowing, and harvesting .52 Although Halloween was not much celebrated and St. Pompion was yet to metamorphose into the jack-o’-lantern, the St. Pompion image foreshadowed the pumpkin’s later incarnation. For many colonists, the pumpkin represented the holiday’s central themes—it was the unsettling face of wild and unruly nature, which could be found in both the world around them and the spirit within them. A few, like Edward Johnson, contested these disparaging characterizations of the pumpkin. He declared in his 1654 Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Savior in New En­ gland, “Let no man make a jest at Pumpkins, for with this Fruit the Lord was pleased to feed his people to their good content , till Corne and Cattel were increased.”53 For colonists like Johnson, the pumpkin embodied the more pastoral and bucolic qualities of nature and a primitive way of life. As early as the 1650s, those uneasy about the expansion of cities and industrial development (who were the same group that sought upward mobility) valued the pumpkin as an icon of the simpler , more natural existence they supposedly had left behind.54 Less than fifty years after the landing at Plymouth, Benjamin Thompson editorialized on the region’s state of affairs with a nostalgic look back at the first New En­ gland colonists. In the poem “New En­ gland’s Crisis,” he wrote: “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 43 The Times wherein old Pompion was a Saint, When man’s far’d hardly yet without complaint On vilest cates, the dainty Indian maize Was eat with clamp-shells out of wooden trayes Under thatent Hutts without the Cry of Rent, And the best sauce to every Dish, Content When Flesh was food and hairy skins made coats . . . when cinmels were accounted noble blood Among tribes of common herbage food. . . . These golden times (too fortunate to hold) Were quickly fin’d away for love of gold.55 Thompson described “The Times wherein old Pompion was a Saint” as at once difficult and deprived yet hardy and moral. By referring to “cinmels ” (another term for pumpkins and squashes) as royalty among edible plants, perhaps he meant that the pumpkin was a savior when people had little else to eat. He could also have meant that the colonists were living so primitively that their saints were mere pumpkins. Yet instead of calling on the humble pumpkin to criticize uncivilized behavior, as the Puritans did, or to celebrate the colonists’ progress, the poet used it to critique society ’s corruptive “love of gold.” He viewed the pumpkin as the antithesis of economic prosperity and modernity, but in a romantic light. By associating the pumpkin with “golden times,” Thompson imbued it with the qualities of Elysian fields. He equated it with the mythical, halcyon days before capitalism reigned and greed and avarice were paramount. This interpretation of the pumpkin is just a glimmer of what would become the vegetable’s strongest meanings in American culture. These sentimental ideas did not resonate with southerners as much as they did with northerners, even though pumpkins were grown in the South as in the North. Perhaps because the southern colonies were founded primarily as economic enterprises rather than religious or communal utopias, southerners did not share northerners’ nostalgia for the formative early settlement days.56 For southerners, expanding markets and entrepreneurialism were signs of progress, whereas for some New En­ glanders these changes meant falling away from the colonies’ founding ideals. Northern colonists took notice of the pumpkin because its great size and production rate offered not only feasts for starving bellies but 44 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” also a strong, vibrant, and unforgettable maternal symbol of these common ideals. Europeans might have made fun of pumpkins and the people who ate them, and some colonists even chided one another as followers of St. Pompion, yet there was something about the pumpkin that was unlike any of the other natural resources that expanded colonial markets and built colonial cities—something with which New En­ glanders identified. The pumpkin meant something that simple economics could not explain but that would one day make it a valuable commodity. That something was a sense of identity rooted in an agrarian world. Neither corn, tobacco, nor furs carried the pumpkin’s symbolic weight. In the eighteenth century, colonial settlements and economic enterprises stabilized and prospered. The drive for commercial success was predicated on the exploitation of human labor and the land’s seemingly limitless natural resources. Populations diversified as Africans toiled as slaves on the plantations of the South and as Germans, Irish, and ScotsIrish immigrants joined En­ glish and Dutch farming communities in the North and West. Conservation measures to protect forests in the North reflected at least a limited awareness of the effects of commerce on the land and people.57 Indians who had survived persistent epidemics still outnumbered Euro-Americans east of the Appalachian Mountains, but warfare, epidemics, and expanding white settlement were displacing them to the west. While international trade in rice, tobacco, fish, furs, and wheat made family fortunes, there was no profit in pumpkins. Overseas commerce was the route to prosperity, and little demand existed for the American vegetable. In the produce business, pumpkins still sat at the bottom of the market. For example, a long list of vegetable seeds advertised in the March 8, 1793, edition of Maryland Journal and Baltimore Daily Advertiser included turnips, carrots, and kale, but not pumpkins.58 In the late eighteenth century, George Washington grew pumpkins at Mount Vernon—not for sale or for his own consumption but as food for his slaves, an indication of the fruit’s low social status.59 The En­ glish herbalist Philip Miller summed up contemporary attitudes toward pumpkins this way: “These plants require so much room to spread, and their Fruit being very little valu’d in En­ gland, hath occasioned their not being cultivated amongst us; we having so many Plants, Roots, or Fruits, which are greatly preferable to those for Kitchen Uses; but in some parts of “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 45 America, where provisions are not in so great variety, these Fruits may be very acceptable.”60 Exactly what defined a pumpkin was still difficult to pin down. Jonathan Carver’s convoluted phrase, “the melon or pumpkin, which by some are called squashes,” reflects the continued overlapping and imprecise descriptions of pumpkins and squashes in the late colonial era.61 Peter Kalm, one of Carl Linnaeus’s students, who traversed the American eastern seaboard in the 1740s, catalogued “pumpkins of several kinds, oblong, round, flat or compresses, crook-neck, small, etc.,” leaving the impression that a pumpkin was any number of different forms of squash.62 With the publication of Systemae Naturea in 1735, Linnaeus revolutionized the natural sciences by establishing a standardized classification system that is still in use today, but even he could not bring clarity to the confusing world of the pumpkin.63 Linnaeus organized the natural world into animal , plant, and mineral kingdoms, which he subdivided into a hierarchy of classes, orders, genera, and species. Abandoning the vague and competing identifications and nomenclature based on earlier notions of Aristotelian humors, the Doctrine of Signatures, and practical functions, he and other scientists relied on morphology, or physical form and structure. In the case of plants, morphology included the basic forms of leaves, vines or stalks, seeds, and fruits. Later scientists designated species not only by their shared forms but also by their ability to crossbreed and produce offspring.64 Linnaeus grouped pumpkins, melons, cucumbers, squashes, and gourds all within the order (later family) Cucurbitaceae, or gourds, because, to state it very generally, they shared lobed leaves, oval seeds, monoecious flowers, vines with tendrils, and large, seed-bearing fruits.65 He established a universal naming system based on a specimen’s genus and species, a system known as binomial nomenclature—hence, Cucurbita pepo, which encompassed the field pumpkin and other varieties of squashes and gourds. But scientists also classified what were popularly known as pumpkins, summer and winter squash, and gourds into three other species: Cucurbita moschata, C. maxima, and C. ovifera. They identified no distinct botanical trait or separate species for a field pumpkin.66 To add to the confusion, what looked like different types, such as field pumpkins and summer squashes, could crossbreed and produce new forms altogether. In 1716, Cotton Mather described a humorous incident 46 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” involving pumpkins’ and squashes’ propensity to cross-pollinate. According to his story, a friend’s garden outside Boston was periodically robbed of squashes. “To inflict a pretty little punishment on the thieves,” Mather explained, his friend “planted some gourds among the squashes (which are in aspect very like them) at certain places which he distinguished with a private mark, that he might not be himself imposed upon. By this method, the honest man saved himself no squashes by ye trick; for they were so infected and embittered by the gourds that there was not eating of them.”67 Sorting out a clear definition of a pumpkin sounds confusing because it is. The main point is that no botanical difference exists between a pumpkin and other forms of squash. The distinctions Americans have made are based on cultural ideas, not objective evidence. The shifty nature of the pumpkin family was perhaps one reason pumpkin farming was not a moneymaking venture. The vegetable’s value lay in the kitchen cellar, not in the marketplace. Americans raised pumpkins primarily to feed their families rather than to garner wealth. The lack of a market for pumpkins was partially a reflection of the domestic food economy at the time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most Americans lived on farms and produced almost all their own food. Wealthy colonists obtained luxury items such as spices and alcoholic spirits through trade, but even the elites produced meat, fruits and vegetables, and beverages at home. In her journal chronicling a trip from Boston to New York in 1704, Sarah Kemble Knight noted that a New Haven justice “had gone into the field with a Brother in office to gather his Pompions,” and both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington procured their own harvests, albeit through slave labor.68 The ability of pumpkins and squash to thrive in a variety of environments encouraged people to grow and consume them throughout the colonies in spite of the prejudices against the vegetable. Pumpkins were as ubiquitous in Maryland and Virginia as in Massachusetts and Connecticut . British officer Thomas Anburey reported from New York in 1787, “The inhabitants plant great quantities of squashes, which is a species of pompions or melons; the seed of it [is] cultivated with assiduity.”69 Peter Kalm noted in the 1740s, “Each farmer in the En­ glish plantations has a large field planted with pumpkins, and the Germans, Swedes, Dutch, and other Europeans settled in their colonies plant them.”70 Indian communities relied on pumpkins and squash as much as ever. Attributing a “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 47 scarcity of wild game to overhunting, the Jesuit Sieur Aubry stated in 1723 that the Iroquois in and around his Quebec post “seldom have any food but Indian corn, beans, and squashes.”71 After a raid on an Iroquois village in 1779, one soldier noted in his diary: “The fields contain about one hundred acres beans, cucumbers, simblens, watermelons and pumpkins in such quantities (were it represented in the manner it should be) would be almost incredible to a civilized people.”72 Journals and letters from as far south as Georgia and the Carolinas noted the propagation of pumpkins for domestic consumption.73 John Lawson recalled seeing “pompions yellow and very large” while touring North Carolina around 1700.74 One traveler described a South Carolina farm on which forty-five acres were planted in rice for the market, and another forty-five acres were “sowed with Indian Corn, Pease, Pompions, Potatoes, Melons, and other Eatables, for the Use of the Family.”75 Pumpkins were so prodigious in the South that one family in South Carolina named its rice plantation “Pompion Hill.”76 Because New En­ glanders had fewer varieties of fruits and vegetables to choose from in their colder northern climate, they might have depended on pumpkins more than Southerners. Still, the plant was a common part of farm life throughout the colonies, North and South. Although few Americans in the twenty-first century can imagine an autumn festival without hundreds of pumpkins resting on haystacks and strewn in fields, corn and wheat, not pumpkins, were historically at the center of American harvest celebrations.77 Of the few accounts that document community harvest festivals in the colonial period, not one mentions a pumpkin as the symbolic core of the event, even though the vegetable had been used historically as an icon of nature’s bounty. By making grain the focus of their festivities, American settlers adhered to traditions long established in Europe. Over many generations and across broad regions, farming communities celebrated the last grain harvest of the season with feasting, dancing, and other merrymaking, along with grain maiden figures or effigies, farming competitions, and the symbolic reenacting of harvest events such as the ritualized cutting of the last sheaf of wheat. Their purpose was to commemorate the good fortune of a bountiful harvest and give thanks to the religious deity who provided it. Like the Pilgrims’ and Indians’ 1621 celebration, the festivals celebrated the results of a long season’s labor and the blessings of an ample store of food. 48 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” A Frenchman traveling in Virginia around 1700 considered the harvest season to be the time of “the principal festivals of . . . rejoicing” in that colony.78 He noted that it was “the custom of the country” to have a big communal feast after the last corn was brought in from the fields. Despite Puritans’ dour reputation, they still apparently enjoyed a good party, especially if it came in the guise of work.79 In A Trip to New-En­ gland, Edward Ward noted that “husking Ind-corn, is as good sport for the Amorous Wag-tailes in New En­ gland, as Maying amongst us is for our Youths and Wenchs.”80 At the end of the 1700s, the poet Joel Barlow described similar festivities in his poem “Hasty Pudding.” He wrote: “For now, the corn-house filled, the harvest-home, / The invited neighbors to the husking come; / A frolic scene, where work, and mirth, and play / United their charms to chase the hours away.”81 Communal events brought men and women together not just for work but also for romantic pursuits. The celebration of nature’s fertility aroused human desires as well. But even though Europeans historically associated pumpkins with sexuality and fertility, and the colonists made pumpkins a common part of their diet, no one mentioned them in the few records that document these harvest events. In the colonial harvest celebrations, corn was queen, not the pumpkin. Colonial Americans continued a steady consumption of pumpkins in the eighteenth century because they were inexpensive to produce, grew like weeds, and were durable and versatile as a foodstuff. When people had no apples for pies, barley for beer, or meat for supper, they could substitute the prolific pumpkin. Paul Dudley explained the appeal: Among the remarkable Instances of the Power of Vegetation, I shall begin with an Account of a Pumpkin Seed, which I have well attested, from a worthy Divine. The Relation is as follows: That in the Year 1699, a single Pumpkin Seed was accidentally dropped in a small Pasture where Cattle had been fodder’d for some Time. This single Seed took Root of itself, and without any Manner of Care or Cultivation; the Vine run along over several Fences, and spread over a large Piece of Ground far and wide, and continued its Progress till the Frost came and killed it. This Seed had no more than one Stalk, but a very large one ; for it measured eight Inches round; from this single Vine, they gathered two hundred and sixty Pumpkins; and, one with another, as big as an half “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 49 Peck, enough in the Whole, to fill a large Tumbrel, besides a considerable Number of small and unripe Pumpkins, that they made no Account of.82 In addition to its massive output, the pumpkin’s late harvest time and its hardiness encouraged its use in the kitchen. Jonathan Carver, during his travels in America in the late seventeenth century, observed: “The craneneck , which greatly excels all the others, are usually hung up for a winter’s store, and in this manner might be preserved for several months.”83 Peter Kalm provided a good synopsis of the pumpkin’s versatility in the eighteenth-century colonial kitchen.84 Although the cooking methods he described reflect European tastes and habits, American Indian influence is also strongly evident. Kalm reported: The French and the En­ glish also slice them and put the slices before the fire to roast: when they are done they generally put sugar on the pulp. Another way of roasting them is to cut them through the middle, take out all the seeds, put the halves together again and roast them in an oven. When they are quite done some butter is put in, which being imbibed into the pulp renders it very palatable. The settlers often boil pumpkins in water, and afterwards eat them alone or with meat. Some make a thick pottage of them by boiling them in water and afterwards macerating the pulp. This is again boiled with a little of the water, and a good deal of milk and stirred about while it is boiling. Sometimes the pulp is kneaded into a dough with maize and other flour; of this they make pancakes. Some make puddings and tarts of pumpkins.85 One source in 1770 noted that Indians in Pennsylvania were “very particular in their choice of pumpkins and squashes, and in their manner of cooking them. The women say that the less water is put to them, the better the dish they make, and that it would be still better if they were stewed without any water, merely in the steam of the sap which they contain.”86 Another technique called for baking the shell in cabbage leaves and then serving the pumpkin whole, with cream poured into the middle.87 Colonial cooks freely interchanged pumpkins and squash in their recipes. They might specify one or the other but were not consistent. Besides serving as an entree or a side dish, the adaptable pumpkin made a ready substitute for a multitude of other ingredients. Like Kalm, 50 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” Carver observed that Americans used pumpkin “partly as a substitute for bread.”88 Whiter, lighter bread made from refined wheat flour was most desirable. In contrast, heavy, dark breads made from barley, rye, cornmeal, or pumpkin connoted more rustic tastes. Sarah Knight, even though she was hungry after a day’s travel, once turned down a tavern’s fare, saying, “[We] would have eat a morsell ourselves, But the pumpkin and Indianmixt bread had such an Aspect.”89 If pumpkin bread did not suit someone ’s fancy, there were “pompion chips” to whet their appetite. “To make Pompion Chips,” a South Carolina recipe book from the 1770s explained, “shave your pumpkin thin with a plain and cut it in slips about the width of your finger, put shreds of Lemon peal among it, wet your sugar with orange Juice and boil it into syrup. Then put in your chips and lemon Peal and let them boil until done.”90 A farmer from the Carolinas constructed an outbuilding, called a “pumpkin house,” just for the purpose of drying pumpkin to prolong its longevity and diversify its uses.91 Kalm remarked of dried pumpkins, “I own they are eatable in that state, and very welcome to a hungry stomach.”92 Some cooks boiled dried pumpkin down into a thick paste and used it to flavor and sweeten dishes.93 Throughout the eighteenth century, only the wealthy could afford white cane sugar imported from the West Indies. Shipments arrived in the form of eight- to ten-pound cones, called loaves, that diners shaved off sparingly with sugar shears. As with grains, the whiter and more refined, the better.94 Molasses, a cheaper by-product of sugar refining, was a common ingredient in many kitchens. At the less desirable end of the sweetener scale were locally produced maple syrup, honey, and pumpkin. They were consumed throughout the colonial period because of the prodigious cost of imports. Sweeteners and spices were important not just as flavorings but also as food preservatives and as ingredients in distilled beverages. The main spices used today for pumpkin pie, including cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and allspice, were also common ingredients in colonial kitchens, and were used to flavor meats, fruits, and vegetables alike.95 Like molasses, the spices were West Indies imports, but their costs were affordable to many colonial families. Pumpkin ale and beer were economical substitutes for more popular malt drinks. In an era before sanitized and filtered water, many colonists had a healthy and reasonable distrust of the safety of water, which commonly carried parasites or worse. They deemed cider, beer, and rum to be “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 51 safer and better tasting than water. They also considered distilled or fermented drinks to be more robust and fortifying than the more insipid natural beverage.96 One En­ glishman touring America in 1711 wrote that “ye greatest punishment of all to me is ye drinking allmost allways water, for we cannot afford wine it is dear.”97 Colonists brewed beverages at home or sent ingredients to a malt house for brewing. Most people associated pumpkin beer, like pumpkin culinary dishes, with the impoverished. Robert Beverly commented that the “poor sort brew beer with molasses, bran, Indian corn malt, and pompions.”98 A lyrical poem exclaimed, “Oh, we can make liquor to sweeten our lips, of pumpkins, of parsnips, of walnut-tree chips!”99 Most of the references to pumpkin beer are from Virginia, possibly because the vegetable was prolific in that colony, or perhaps because Virginians needed it less as a foodstuff and more as a beverage than people did in other places. The Dutch traveler Adrian van der Donck noted in his New York travel journal that he had heard that colonists there also made “a beverage from it.”100 A recipe for “Pompion Ale,” dated 1771, instructed, “Let the Pompion be Beaten in a Trough and pressed as Apples. The Expressed Juice is to be boiled in a Copper a considerable Time and carefully skimmed that there may be no Remains of the fibrous Part of the Pulp. After that intention is answered let the liquor be hopped cooled fermented etc. as Malt Beer.”101 Pumpkin ale allegedly had a “slight twang,” suggesting that its flavor was off-putting in comparison with that of other beers. Yet according to the recipe’s author, aging improved the flavor, just as it did with most fine spirits. He explained that “three dozen bottles of this Pompion ale had been filled two years previously. It was greatly improved and the ‘Pompion Twang’ has acquired something of a Mellowness approaching to Musk which is far more agreeable than before.”102 Virginia plantation owner Landon Carter used pumpkins to make a form of vinegar that he called “Pumperkin.” In his diary entries for September 1771 and 1778, he mentioned storing a ninety-gallon cask of pumperkin in each of those years, along with much larger quantities of cider.103 Precursors to the sweet pumpkin pie that Americans are familiar with today pop up only occasionally in accounts of eighteenth-century culinary habits. Kalm described a pumpkin dish that consisted of mashed pumpkin mixed with milk, cinnamon, cloves, and lemon peel, but it is unclear whether diners considered the concoction a dessert.104 Another 52 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” rendition, dating from 1763, called for baking apple and pumpkin slices together with plenty of sugar in “some good paste.”105 For Thanksgiving celebrants, pumpkin made as undistinguished an impression in the late 1700s as it had in the early 1600s. Within fifty years of the Plymouth celebration, New En­ gland colonists had merged Harvest Home and Thanksgiving into an annual autumn holiday, though this tradition still had not taken hold in the South. Each New En­ gland colony set aside a day on which to give thanks for the health and well-being of the land by attending church, praying, and eating a family feast.106 The diarist Juliana Smith recounted pumpkin being served at Thanksgiving dinner in the fall of 1779, though she gave it no special notice. She stated, “Our Mince Pies were good although we had to use dried Cherries as I told you and the meat was shoulder of venison, instead of Beef. The Pumpkin Pies, Apple Tarts and big Indian Puddings lacked for nothing save Appetite by the time we had got around to them.”107 Another colonial version of “Thanksgiving pie” consisted of bear’s meat, dried pumpkin, and maple sugar in a cornmeal crust, for which, according to the source, “the colonial wife [was] complimented on her achievement.”108 Although it is not readily evident from these accounts, the pumpkin was becoming something more than just another squash. As Americans began to sculpt their own sense of identity, which was decidedly not En­ glish, the very qualities for which many had chided the pumpkin—its unruly yet bountiful nature, its native roots, its lack of worth in international trade, and its associations with subsistence agriculture—took on new worth and meanings. And as the meanings of the pumpkin changed, so did people’s appetite for it. While Benjamin Thompson’s poem is the earliest example of sentimental literature about pumpkins, Amelia Simmons ’s publication of American Cookery in 1796 marks the beginning of the transformation of the pumpkin from uninspired side dish into glorified dessert.109 Sweetening the vegetable was a means not simply of enhancing its flavor but also of celebrating its meanings. Americans have commonly recorded colonists’ declarations of independence through acts of civil disobedience and heroic battles, but recipes created in the kitchen are also significant.110 As the first cookbook published in the United States, Simmons’s American Cookery was self-consciously an indigenous and patriotic American text, although one with a New En­ gland bias, having been published “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 53 in Connecticut.111 Before American Cookery, the only published cookbooks available were written by Europeans and printed in Europe, so they did not always reflect or cater to American tastes, products, and sensibilities . The omission of the pumpkin from other popular eighteenth-century cookbooks, such as Eliza Smith’s 1727 The Compleat Housewife and Susannah Carter’s 1802 The Frugal Colonial Housewife, possibly reflects the pumpkin’s disfavor among wealthier women, toward whom the cookbooks were directed, or a culinary bias against the American vegetable, since these cookbooks were published in London. Even though published cookbooks gained popularity, the most common way in which women exchanged recipes was still through oral tradition or homemade “receipt books.”112 Little is known about Amelia Simmons, which has led some historians to suggest that she was a fictional creation of the publisher.113 The title page identified Simmons as “an American orphan.” Referring to America as a child was a literary device commonly used to define America’s relationship to its motherland, En­ gland, during the Revolutionary War period.114 In the cookbook’s preface, Simmons, as the archetypal American or as the embodiment of the nation, described her humble origins and a life predicated on honest labor rather than privilege. She is independent and self-sufficient. And unlike “those females who have parents, or brothers, or riches, to defend their indiscretions”—presumably like European aristocracy—she explained, “the [American] orphan must depend solely upon character.” Tying the idea of an indigenous American culture to popular rhetoric about equality, the cookbook’s recipes profess to be “adapted to this country and all grades of life.” In contrast to previously published cookbooks, American Cookery offered recipes for native American foodstuffs, including pumpkins and corn. America’s first national cookbook maintained the pumpkin’s status as indigenous American fare while elevating it as an emblem of the nation’s culture. And Simmons made a clear distinction between a pumpkin and a squash. Unlike all cooks and culinary observers before her, she cataloged winter squash as a vegetable and pumpkin as a dessert. “A Crookneck, or Winter Squash Pudding” is a recipe for the typical savory colonial porridge, which called for stewing squash—she suggests substituting potatoes, yams, or pumpkins—with apples, bread crumbs, and eggs to create a dish reminiscent of savory bread pudding. The recipe for 54 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” “Pompkin,” in contrast, is not a form of daily sustenance at all, but a sweet treat. Simmons gave cooks two versions of “Pompkin”: No. 1. One quart stewed and strained pompkin, 3 pints cream, 9 beaten eggs, sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger, laid into paste No. 7 or 3, and with a dough spur, cross and cheque it, and baked in dishes 3 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.115 The first pie, made with nine eggs and three pints of cream, would have been large, rich, and creamy. It probably had the consistency of cheesecake , and it is likely that Simmons intended it for high society. As Peter Kalm remarked, people “above the vulgar put sugar to [pumpkin].”116 The second pie, more reflective of everyday fare, calls for molasses, regular milk, and smaller quantities of ingredients. The two recipes suggest that both higher classes and poorer people had begun to use pumpkins to create sweet desserts, a culinary form that showcases the vegetable’s symbolic value. Unlike the squash, which remained an unremarkable side dish, the pumpkin was now being touted as something to celebrate and as a pleasant reward. It had taken on greater importance as a symbol than as sustenance. It is not surprising to find a sugary pie categorized as a dessert, but a pumpkin? Cherries and apples make a lot more sense than this bland-tasting vegetable. Unlike in the past, desperation and starvation are unlikely explanations for cooking with pumpkin in the late 1700s, for the pumpkin was now being prepared with more expensive sweeteners, and plenty of other fruits were available to choose from by this time. But perhaps its blandness is exactly why Americans invested it with such rich meaning. The blank slate made the meanings all the more intense. Although the pumpkin never provided colonists with surplus wealth or cultural cachet, it always gave them something to eat, and in that lay a story for a new democratic nation. Eating pumpkins signified a family’s takingcareofitselfonitsownpieceofland,nomatterhowhumblethesize, and depending on no one but itself. Growing pumpkins required nothing more than land, honest work, and family. Because the pumpkin produced large yields on minimal plots, wealth and social class were superfluous to “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” = 55 its production. Any man, at least any white man, could plant pumpkins, and every woman could transform them into food for the family, nourishing themselves and the nation’s democratic aspirations in the process. The pumpkin, therefore, made a strong political statement. It embodied the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal of a nation of self-sufficient farmers. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson famously wrote, “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”117 Citizens’ economic independence more broadly enabled national independence, because the country did not have to rely on outside sources, En­ gland in particular, to sustain itself. With the pumpkin, the nation’s citizens were able to provide for themselves. Making the lowly pumpkin—a vegetable Europeans stigmatized as primitive and rustic—a delicacy and publishing a recipe for it in the first American cookbook was a powerful expression of American pride and independence. Women contributed to this nationalistic discourse and helped celebrate these principles by making pumpkin taste sweeter and better. Transforming pumpkin into a delicious pie was one way women showed their support for these political ideals, and by giving slices to their families and friends they offered others a means to do the same. Simmons was adamant about women’s “having an opinion and determination” and serving as “good wives and members of society.”118 Although women lacked a vote and had a limited public voice, the recipes they created and the food they prepared were far-reaching and fundamental for establishing a sense of American identity and independence. Baking pumpkin pie was one vital way to achieve these ends. For most of the colonial period, people dreamed of oranges but fed on pumpkins. Suffering through many hardships, early colonists were likely thankful for the sustenance that pumpkins provided, but their letters and journals indicate that they were equally appreciative of being able to switch to other foodstuffs when they could. Almost everyone grew pumpkins because they produced bountiful harvests without much effort or cost. Yet they offered little economic profit and even less social collateral. Piercing the fog of national memory, we find that the pumpkin may not have had a place on the table at the mythic first Thanksgiving feast. Chroniclers of colonial harvest celebrations wrote nary a word about them. And to further upset the American myth of the pumpkin, 56 < “The Times Wherein Old Pompion Was a Saint” the vegetable was indigenous not just to New En­ gland; farmers produced them throughout the colonies. Yet while some Europeans scorned the pumpkin as rural peasant food and others equated it with hedonism, the vegetable triggered a sense of pride and nostalgia in some early Americans. It did more than fill dinner plates; it communicated a set of assumptions about who Americans were and what America stood for in contrast to Europeans. Although a pumpkin was not a pumpkin in the same way Americans define it today— according to what it looks like, the way most people prepare it, and what it means—these historic uses and definitions nevertheless resonate into the present. The pumpkin’s future was anything but destined at the time, however. In the early nineteenth century, while some Americans made it into a dessert , many others tossed it into troughs for their cows and pigs. Although making pie and making fodder out of pumpkins seem contradictory, the acts are more closely related than might be imagined at first thought. The circumstances and ideas that would unite these acts in the next decades explain not only why Simmons made pumpkin pie instead of squash pie but also why American families would soon, at last, begin to serve pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. ...

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