pudding
slightly sweetened and boiled in a bag was everywhere made. It was told
that many New England families had three hundred and sixty-five such
puddings in a year.

The virtues of "jonny-cake" have been loudly sung in the interesting
pages of _Shepherd Tom_. The way the corn should be carried to the mill,
the manner in which it should be ground, the way in which the stones
should revolve, and the kind of stones, receive minute description, as
does the mixing and the baking, to the latter of which the middle board
of red oak from the head of a flour-barrel is indispensable as a
bakeboard, while the fire to bake with must be of walnut logs. Hasty
pudding, corn dumplings, and corn-meal porridge, so eminently good that
it was ever mentioned with respect in the plural, as "them porridge,"
all are described with the exuberant joyousness of a happy, healthful
old age in remembrance of a happy, high-spirited, and healthful youth.

The harvesting of the corn afforded one of the few scenes of gayety in
the lives of the colonists. A diary of one Ames, of Dedham,
Massachusetts, in the year 1767, thus describes a corn-husking, and most
ungallantly says naught of the red ear and attendant osculation:--

"Made a husking Entertainm't. Possibly this leafe may last a
Century and fall into the hands of some inquisitive Person for
whose Entertainm't I will inform him that now there is a Custom
amongst us of making an Entertainm't at husking of Indian Corn
whereto all the neighboring Swains are invited and after the Corn
is finished they like the Hottentots give three Cheers or huzza's
but cannot carry in the husks without a Rhum bottle; they feign
great Exertion but do nothing till Rhum enlivens them, when all is
done in a trice, then after a hearty Meal about 10 at Night they go
to their pastimes."

There was one way of eating corn which was spoken of by all the early
writers and travellers which we should not be very well satisfied with
now, but it shows us how useful and necessary corn was at that time, and
how much all depended on it. This preparation of corn was called nocake
or nookick. An old writer named Wood thus defined it:--

"It is Indian corn parched in the hot ashes, the ashes being sifted
from it; it is afterwards beaten to powder and put into a long
leatherne bag trussed at the Indian's backe like a knapsacke, out
of which they take three spoons