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Ye Ancient Standing Dish

By John, 11 January, 2012
Description

I guess this was a seventeenth-century version of french fries made from pumpkin. I don't mean it was fried in hot fat, just that it was ubiquitous in the taverns of the day. Apparently it was so easy and so common in colonial times that it was the one foodstuff that could be found in any tavern.

One original recipe suggests the taste, when dressed, resembles apples, but our research has not yet reached that happy conclusion.

John Josselyn puts a different spin on it in his New England Rarities: when cooked it resembles baked apples. Alas! It didn't do that for us, either.

Now, three and a half centuries is a long time. If the past is a foreign land, then Pilgrim Plimoth is very far away. We don't know how the apples of the day looked when baked, but we know they were very different from the apples of today. In fact, I suspect a baked Roxbury Russet may hold its shape more than would be expected of a Gala or a Honeycrisp.

The pumpkin did hold its shape, but it was tender, too.  I might dress it with boiled cider rather than cider vinegar. There is hope here.

Yield
16 Servings
Preparation time
6 hours
Ingredients
1 Sugar Pumpkin
1 oz Water
  T Vinegar (see notes)
  T Ginger (to taste)
  T Nutmeg (to taste)
1 T Butter (to taste)
Instructions

To prepare:

  1. Cut the flesh of a sugar-pumpkin (not a Jack-o-Lantern pumpkin) into dice and trim off the skin.
  2. Simmer the diced pumpkin in a stew-pot with a tiny bit of water until tender ("to the consistency of baked apples")
  3. Transfer to a bowl and add butter, then add vinegar and ginger or nutmeg to taste.
Notes

Richmond tried cider vinegar and proclaimed the result unsatisfactory. Malt vinegar might be better, or it may be a lost cause. If you try this, please enter your thoughts in the Comments section.

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