Americans forget about the humble pumpkin until the nippy days of autumn herald the harvest holidays. It is one of our best known cultural symbols. Can anyone imagine Halloween without jack-o'-lanterns or Thanksgiving without aromatic pumpkin pies? And yet the pumpkin is one of our least appreciated culinary delights.
The pumpkin evokes nostalgia for colonial days. The English settlers of Jamestown and Plymouth saw the various Algonquian tribes growing pumpkins but were confused as to exactly what they were. Thinking them a variant of the squash, a vegetable known in Europe, they called them pompions, a French word derived form the Greek pepon, meaning sun-ripened.
Probably indigenous to South America and first cultivated by the ancient Peruvians, the pumpkin was a staple food for natives of the Western Hemisphere, ranking next to maize or corn and beans in importance. It is a member of the gourd family, which also includes melons, cucumbers, and squash.
A Colonial Treat
Although its taste did not appeal to the early settlers at first, they soon discovered the pumpkin was easy to grow and provided badly needed nourishment during the long, cold winter. It grew in such abundance that one writer of the time thought he saw a hundred pumpkins springing form a single seed.
Pumpkins became a necessity for pioneers pushing inland from the eastern seaboard. The first settlers cooked them as the Indians did - boiled with beans and corn: included in soups and stews; boiled, mashed, and patted into cakes and then fried like croquettes; and for feasts, boiled and sweetened with maple syrup or wild honey.
For the first Massachusetts Thanksgiving in 1621, a pumpkin shell was probably scooped out, filled with milk and wild honey, and baked whole in hot ashes. As the years went on, spices and molasses or maple syrup were added, but the plain, baked pumpkin, served with milk, remained a favorite every day dish. Since grains were scarce, pumpkins were even used to make bread. Their seeds were ground fine, combined with cornmeal, and baked.
The most popular early pumpkin dish was Pompionsause, which John Josseyn described in his New - England Rarities (1671) as "the ancient New England standing dish." The stewed, diced pumpkin was flavored with butter, vinegar, and spices, which made it "tart like an apple."
Travelers carried dried circular slices of pumpkin to add flavor to campfire posts of soup or to substitute for molasses or honey as a sweetener. And without doubt, many a colonial roof-raising party was celebrated with a pumpkin drink, for an early song went:
Oh, we can make liquor
To sweeten our lips.
Of pumpkins, of parsnips,
Of walnut-tree chips.
The words of another contemporary song underscored the growing popularity of the
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