by many generations of New
England cooks, I find this "singular good" rule to make a "Pumpion Pye:"

"Take about halfe a pound of Pumpion and slice it, a handful of
Tyme, a little Rosemary, Parsley and Sweet Marjoram slipped off the
stalkes, and chop them smal, then take Cinamon, Nutmeg, Pepper, and
six Cloves and beat them, take ten Eggs and beat them, then mix
them, and beat them altogether, and put in as much Sugar as you
think fit, then fry them like a froiz, after it is fryed, let it
stand til it be cold, then fill your Pye, take sliced Apples thinne
rounde-wayes, and lay a row of the Froiz and layer of Apples with
Currans betwixt the layer while your Pye is fitted, and put in a
good deal of sweet butter before you close it, when the pye is
baked take six yelks of Eggs, some White-wine or Vergis, and make a
Caudle of this, but not too thicke, cut up the Lid and put it in,
stir them wel together whilst the Eggs and Pompions be not
perceived and so serve it up."

I am sure there would be no trouble about the pompions being perceived,
and I can fancy the modest half-pound of country vegetable blushing a
deeper orange to find its name given to this ambitious and
compound-sentenced concoction which helped to form part of the "simple
diet of the good old times." I have found no modern cook bold enough to
"prove" (as the book says) this pumpion pie; but hope, if any one
understands it, she will attempt it.

Potatoes were on the list of seeds, fruits, and vegetables that were
furnished to the Massachusetts Bay colonists in 1628, and fifteen tons
(which were probably sweet potatoes) were imported from Bermuda in 1636
and sold in Boston at twopence a pound. Winthrop wrote of "potatose" in
1683. Their cultivation was rare. There is a tradition that the Irish
settlers at Londonderry, N. H., began the first systematic planting of
potatoes. At the Harvard Commencement dinner, in 1708, potatoes were on
the list of supplies. A crop of eight bushels, which one Hadley farmer
had in 1763, was large--too large, since "if a man ate them every day he
could not live beyond seven years." Indeed, the "gallant root of
potatoes" was regarded as a sort of forbidden fruit--a root more than
suspected of being an over-active aphrodisiac, and withal so wholly
abandoned as not to have been mentioned in the Bible; and when Parson
Jonathan Hubbard, of Sheffield, raised twenty bu