The Best Leftover

 

When I put his dinner down on his highchair tray, my son used to ask me, with a piercing look and a note of stern warning in his voice—as if to say, don’t lie to me—“Is it fresh?” I would look at this 2-year-old child, sitting there in diapers and a bib, and wonder where in the world this suspicion that maybe I’d sneaked something out of the back of the refrigerator and scraped off the mold off before palming it off on him came from. I never figured it out—I had cooked “fresh” every night since he was born—or even how so tiny a child could think to ask such a thing. But one thing was sure, my son had no appreciation for leftovers.

Most of us do. Growing up, my brother’s favorite was cold spaghetti. Nearly everyone (and now even my son, who is 22 and began to give in to leftovers a year or so ago) likes leftover pizza. Stews, of course. Turkey, for sandwiches. Cold steak. But the really best leftovers, in my mind, are those you can do something with. Leftover rice, for fried rice or rice balls, or eating as cereal with cream and brown sugar. Leftover potatoes, for home fries or potato cakes. But the best leftover of all, for me, is bread. When it is in that transitory state between soft and fresh—when you just want to eat it—and hard and stale—when you just want to throw it out—it is something altogether new: a great ingredient. And it finds its highest calling in the lowly bread pudding.

New Englanders didn’t invent bread pudding, but Englanders may have, and brought it over to us here, where we eat it all the time; it is often even referred to as “New England Bread Pudding.” Its popularity is unsurprising: bread pudding is a brilliant resolution to the New Englander’s paradoxical combination of frugality and love of sweet indulgence, killing two birds with one stone. We love finding the luxurious in the practical.

Bread pudding is comforting winter food, can be thrown together quickly from those four great staples, bread, eggs, sugar, and milk, then made your own with whatever else you have on hand. There are versions too numerous to mention, because there are very few things that don’t find themselves at home with a little bread and custard. Fresh fruits like bananas and apples, dried fruits ranging from the traditional raisins to cranberries and tropical varieties, nuts of all kinds, and of course chocolate, are all welcome. Even the bread is malleable. French, Italian, challah, brioche, pannetone, plain old white or whole wheat, or the cinnamon bread from my last post. I love bread pudding warm from the oven. But it is also great cold. Leftover.

Cinnamon Bread Pudding

Second only to apple pie in being just as divine for breakfast as for dessert. It is a brunch favorite in New England. Serves 6.

About 6 ¾ “slices cinnamon bread (about 3 cups torn)
3 T soft butter
1/3 cup large raisins, such as red flame

3 eggs
3 cups milk (2%is fine)
½ cup sugar
¼ cup bourbon, such as Jack Daniels
1 tea vanilla
½ tea salt
¼ tea freshly grated nutmeg

Heat the oven to 350F. Place a large lasagna pan, about 1/3 filled with water, in the oven while it heats. Butter a smaller baking dish, about 11x7x1.5".

Butter the bread and tear it into pieces to make about 3 cups, pressed down. Place the bread into the buttered dish and scatter the raisins on top. Beat the eggs, then beat in the milk, sugar, bourbon, vanilla, salt, and nutmeg. Pour it over the bread, and let it sit for about 20 minutes.

Place the dish into the pan of water in the oven. Bake for are 45-50 minutes, until puffed, lightly colored, and a knife placed in the center comes out clean. Remove to a rack for just a few minutes and serve warm, plain or with cream, ice cream, or a sauce such as chocolate or caramel.

               

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is the go-to spice for traditional baking, making it the most popular spice in the country after, I suppose, pepper. Interesting to think that these two favorites are both hot—cinnamon is definitely hot, although we rarely think that because it is so often mixed with sugar, which brings out its sweetness, and is usually used sparingly. But it packs a punch, coupled with its unmistakable flavor, in large doses.

Cinnamon comes from the bark of an evergreen tree of the same name, native to Sri Lanka. This is the “true” cinnamon, often called “Ceylon” or canela and distinct from cassia cinnamon, the most common in this country. Cassia is stronger and darker in color, noticeable primarily in the rolled bark, or quills, sold as “whole cinnamon.”

I like to have both the whole and ground on hand. The ground is as much of a staple as salt; I keep some near the espresso machine for sprinkling on my morning latte, and some mixed with sugar in a little shaker for cinnamon toast, a treat that never seems to wear out. It goes into most pies, into cakes with fruit and nuts, into truffles and ice cream and crumb toppings, and into sauces and stews. The quills are wonderful for the latter as well—I use them a lot in Mexican cooking--and for preserves where you want intense spicy flavor without sacrificing clarity in the finished product. A few years ago I developed a terrific drink, the cinnamini, made with cranberry juice, orange oil, and vodka in which fresh cinnamon sticks had been steeped for about a month. Wonderful.

Maple Cinnamon Bread

Cinnamon is the star of this bread, cutting a swath through the dough and undiluted by sugar. It makes very nice French Toast and bread pudding. 2 loaves.

2 cups boiling water
½ cup RI stone ground jonnycake cornmeal
3 T lard
1 tea salt
½ cup maple syrup (Grade B)
½ cup lukewarm water
1 pkg active dry yeast
5 cups flour plus more for dusting
2 T butter, melted
3T best-quality ground cinnamon

In a large stainless steel pot (about 5 qt), bring the 2 cups of water to a boil. Stir in the jonnycake meal and cook over moderate heat, stirring, for about 5 minutes, pressing out any lumps with the back of the spoon, to make a smooth mush. Stir in the salt and the lard until melted. Let it cool slightly, then stir in the maple syrup. Dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water, giving it a stir, and add to the mush. Stir in 2 cups of the flour, cover with a clean towel, and set aside to rise for about an hour.

Add the remaining 3 cups of flour, a cup at a time, to the sponge, stirring well to blend. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured counter or board and knead until smooth, 7 or 8 minutes; use only enough flour to keep the dough from sticking as you knead. Put the dough into a large greased bowl, cover with a towel, and let rise for another hour or until doubled. Turn the dough out onto a board, punching it down lightly. Form into a rough, flattish square and cut the dough in half. Roll each into a small rectangle, about 8”x12”, but no less than about ½” thick; keep the second half under a towel while you prepare the first. Brush some of melted butter sparingly across the dough, and distribute half the cinnamon on each rectangle; with a dry hand, spread it out to cover completely. Starting from the short side, roll the dough up firmly but not so tightly that you deflate it, and place it into 2 small (8 ½ x 4 ½ x 2 ½) bread pans, brushed lightly with some of the butter. Cover and let rise for an hour.

Bake the bread at 350F for 40-45 minutes, or until golden; the kitchen will smell wonderful. Just before removing from the oven, brush lightly with the last of the remaining melted butter. Remove and turn out onto a rack to cool before slicing.

      

Food for Neighbors

The past few weeks have presented far more of those occasions when you feel like you should bring over a hot dish than is statistically right. 2009 has started out unnaturally, and unfairly, skewed toward illness and death, and I hope it has gotten it out of its system and that this is not a trend.

So I’ve been making food for friends and neighbors, of the covered dish variety, the kind that on social occasions goes to pot lucks and church suppers (if I were the sort to go to church), but on sadder ones is designed to allow the recipient to take it out of the refrigerator, heat it in the oven, and have a complete meal without giving it a thought. Such food should be comforting and sustaining. It should be rich and flavorful, to compensate for the inevitability, on such occasions, that the senses of those eating will be as numb as the rest of them. Perhaps they will taste it, and know they are alive.

Today I am making macaroni and cheese for a neighbor whose husband is a bedridden invalid on oxygen and who is herself having surgery that will incapacitate her for many weeks. She has a school-age child, and though her mother is coming, taking care of three people, one of whom has to be shuttled back and forth to school, is a lot. The least I can do is provide supper.

The Family Macaroni and Cheese

This is the macaroni and cheese that I grew up on, exactly the way my grandmother made it. It will cure what ails you. Serves 6.

6 T unsalted butter
6 T flour
3 cups milk
1 lb aged, extra-sharp white cheddar, grated
½ cup grated parmesan (optional, but a nice addition)
½ tea salt
1/8 tea white pepper
1/8 tea freshly grated nutmeg
16 oz can imported Italian plum tomatoes (or some fresh or imported canned cherry tomatoes)
1 lb dried penne with lines or small shells

1 ½ cups fresh breadcrumbs
2 T unsalted butter

1 whole chicken breast with skin (about 1 ½ lb), optional

 

Butter a 3-qt baking dish. Preheat oven to 350F.

If using the chicken breast, place it in a pot and barely cover it with water. Bring it to a boil, covered, then lower the heat a little and boil gently for 10 minutes with the lid ajar. Remove from the heat and let it cool, covered, in the broth.

In a large heavy pot over medium-low heat, melt the butter until it sizzles, but do not let it brown. Add the flour and stir well; it will foam up and become pasty. Cook for a minute.

Stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, gradually add the milk, starting slowly to allow it to combine and begin to form a smooth sauce. (If using chicken, you can substitute 1 cup of the light cooking broth for 1 cup of the milk if you want). Raise the heat and let it come to a bubble, until thick, stirring all the while. Reduce the heat and season with the salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Let it simmer for a few minutes over low heat, stirring so it does not scorch. Add the cheese a handful at a time, stirring until smooth. Turn off the heat and set aside.

Boil the pasta in salted water until just tender; cook it about 2 minutes less than directed. While the pasta is cooking, drain the tomatoes and chop very   roughly. Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce; fold it in well. Add the tomatoes and fold gently.

Turn the macaroni and cheese into the buttered dish. Sprinkle well with the breadcrumbs to cover completely, and dot with butter. Cover with foil and bake at 350 F for about 15 minutes; remove the foil and cook another 15 minutes, or until bubbling and hot in the center. If you have refrigerated it, bring it room temperature before cooking.

To make fresh breadcrumbs: Trim crusts from firm fresh white bread, tear into large pieces, and put into the food processor. Pulse until you have medium-fine crumbs. Store leftovers in the freezer; thaw before using.

                                                     

Lentils for Luck: Happy New Year

After The Sopranos, everyone knows that the part of New Jersey where I grew up is full of Italians Americans. In fact, Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist had her office in the next town over from where I grew up; his aunt went into a nursing home in the town where I lived when I was a baby; and all kinds of things happened in Newark, where I was born; I pretty much lived my youth in Soprano country.

But I lived in an upper middle class town, and though we were surrounded by Italians my experience with Italian food at the time was limited to the inimitable New Jersey pizza on Friday nights; linguine with clam sauce at the famous Clam Broth House in Hoboken; and the occasional lovely supper of bragiole or lasagna at my friend Maria’s house. Her father, a doctor, used to scold me for putting lots of pepper on my food, claiming that hot food would give me ulcers, and I remember thinking that was a funny thing for a man whose name was Dante to say.

It was not until I arrived in Rhode Island for college that I really began to eat Italian food much the way I used to eat salt bagels or crumb cake at home: pretty much every day. For one thing, it was everywhere; where we had delis, luncheonettes, or Chinese restaurants in New Jersey, Rhode Island had little Italian places serving minestrone, pasta e fagioli, chicken cacciatore, burgers on Italian rolls and oven grinders, all kinds of pasta (baked ziti and stuffed shells were big), and veal parmesan. This was only natural: while New Jersey has the greatest number of Italians, Rhode Island has the largest percentage (New Jersey is third). And while both states are small and densely populated, Rhode Island is so tiny and has so many fewer cultural influences that the presence of Italian Americans is, as we might say here, in your face.

My first Sunday family meal at the house of an Italian friend resulted in my mistaking the lasagna for dinner, only to find it followed by a huge roast. I learned quickly to pace myself, and this same friend kindly gave me some formal preparation for the series of courses one could expect during the holidays, and the expectation that I would have to eat every one, and seconds, too. One year I was invited over for New Year’s. My friend’s mother served a big dish of lentils with a large sausage: the lentils, I was told, signified coins—wealth for the New Year. Lentils are not as convincing a coin as the golden gelt of Hannukah, not even if you try to envision them as tiny copper pennies. And of course gelt seems luckier than legumes to a child or other fancier of chocolate (me, for example). But the combination of lentils with pork was very good, and this first exposure to lentils at age 19 remains a fond introduction, both to the food and the tradition.

Last New Year’s I made a luxurious dish, lobster bisque, but this year lentils and pork seem to suit the simpler times. We could all use a few extra coins, and a little luck. So here is my version of lentils and pork, with a little pasta, too, and sage, in hopes of imparting a little wisdom. There’s something to be said for being sadder but wiser.

 

Mini Farfalle with Lentils, Pork, and Sage

Light but satisfying, you could serve this as a first course or the main dish. Serves 3-4.

1/2 lb  sweet Italian sausage
3 T milk
pinch salt and nutmeg, few twists of the pepper mill

1/2 cup minced carrot (about 1 medium)
2 tea minced garlic
2 T olive oil
1 tea butter

1 tea minced fresh sage
zest of a small lemon

1 1/4  cup cooked lentils (about 1/2 cup dry)
2 cups dried mini farfalle or other small pasta shape

freshly grated parmigiana
additional whole sage leaves for frying (optional)

 

Peel and mince the carrot and the garlic. Using a grater, zest the peel of the lemon onto a piece of wax paper. Stack 4 or 5 large sage leaves, roll them tightly and chop fine; add them to the lemon zest. If desired, dip the remaining, largest sage leaves in flour, shaking off the excess. In a deep frying pan, place about ½” vegetable oil and heat to about 350-375 F; fry the sage leaves in the oil very briefly, until they crisp. Remove to paper towels.

Wash and pick over the lentils. Bring 3 cups water to a boil; add the lentils, and when the water returns to the boil, reduce the heat to a moderate bubble and cook the lentils, partially covered, until just tender, about 20 minutes. Drain and set aside.

While the lentils are cooking, crumble the sausage into a large frying pan and cook, chopping with the side of a wooden spoon, over medium heat until the  meat just loses its color; do not allow it to brown. Add the small amount of salt, pepper, and nutmeg as it cooks, and then the milk, continuing to cook until the milk is absorbed. Remove to a bowl, and clean out the pan.

Put the pan back on the stove, add 1 T olive oil, and heat over moderate heat. Add the carrots and cook slowly for about 2-3 minutes without browning. Set aside.

Cook the pasta in boiling, salted water for about 6 minutes; drain, reserving about 1/2 cup of the cooking water. Return the frying pan with the carrots to the stove, add the remaining T of olive oil and 1 tea butter over moderate heat, then add the garlic, sautéing for a minute. Add the cooked sausage, 1 cup of lentils, and the pasta; toss, adding in a little of the reserved pasta water. Stir in the lemon zest and sage.

Serve, sprinkling over some of the remaining 1/4 cup of lentils, and garnish with freshly grated parm and, if desired, fried sage leaves. 

Fat’s Chance: If Not Now, When?

There are those of us who never left. Loyal and devoted, we continued to eat our butter and bacon, and to bake with our lard, while others, let’s face it, not only denied themselves but probably harmed themselves by eating hydrogenated oils in the form of cheap margarine. I was fortunate to grow up with a father who refused to have the stuff in the house. He was an engineer who loved new technologies, except when it came to his food: that was taking science too far. So we had two forms of butter on the table, hard salted and soft unsalted, to satisfy our varied preferences when it came to the best way to eat a fresh Kaiser roll or bagel.

Like butter, pork fat has been out of favor for decades except in pockets of New England and the South. I’ve known people to react with disgust when I say that my pie crust or biscuits are made with lard, or that I fry my chicken or chiles rellenos in lard. A friend even once refused a freshly made glazed doughnut because it had been fried in lard. Insane, I know. Needless to say, I generally remain silent on the matter of using goose or duck fat to oven-brown my potatoes.

The tides are turning back, however. We now know (as my father always knew) that margarine is suspect. Butter is better for you than the margarine you grew up on. We know that pure lard is better than Crisco, and better yet than butter. We know that “fat-free” as a way of life may actually be life-threatening. People are talking about fat in a good way again, and we are even starting to celebrate its inimitable fatness. Last year the truly beautiful book, Pork & Sons, exalted all things pig; recently, another attractive paean has been published, called, simply, Fat. It’s subtitle, An Appreciation of A Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes, aims to change the misguided mind on the subject.

This all makes us happy in New England, where salt pork remains a fat of choice for traditional cooking, and lard retains the blue ribbon for the flakiest crust (see photo above left…). There’s nothing like the holidays to get people to digress from their habits—some of them, such as wholesale denial of the pleasures of good eating, irrational if not downright self-destructive. Christmas is fat’s chance; take advantage of it.

LCM Pork Cake

Pork cake is a very old New England favorite. It may look a bit like fruitcake, but it is considerably different and, I think, much better. The recipe lends itself to adjustment according to personal taste or on-hand convenience. You can use glacé fruit in this cake, especially citron or citrus peels, dates or apricots (very good), raisins (traditional), and other kinds of nuts (or none). Some more “modern” recipes contain eggs; mine, like most of the old ones, does not. Adjust spices too, to taste, as long as they are very fresh. Makes one loaf or 3 mini loafs.

½ cup currants
½ cup best-quality dried cherries (not from the supermarket)
2 T muscatel (or sherry or port)

1 lb fat-only salt pork, to obtain 1 cup (see Note)
1 cup boiling water or coffee

½ cup molasses
½ cup dark brown sugar
1 cup sugar

3 cups flour
½ tea baking soda
1 tea ground cinnamon, preferably Vietnamese
½ tea freshly grated nutmeg
½ tea ground cardamom
¼ tea ground allspice
¼ tea ground cloves

Preheat oven to 300 F.

Put the currants and cherries into a small bowl with the muscatel and set aside.

Working carefully with a sharp, thin knife such as a slicer, and holding the salt pork horizontally on a board, remove the skin and discard. For safety, wash your hands and the knife frequently. If the fat is coated with salt, rinse it well and pat dry with paper towels. Put the pork fat into a food processor with the metal blade and process until it is well-ground and beginning to look creamy. Pack well into a 1-cup measure; use some of the leftover to grease a full-size bread pan or 3 mini bread pans, and freeze the rest.

Put the cup of fat into a large bowl and pour the boiling water over it; stir. When it is cool, stir in the molasses and the brown and white sugars. Sift 1 cup of the flour with the spices over the fruit and mix well. Sift the remaining flour and the baking soda into the fat-sugar mixture, then fold in the floured/seasoned fruit. Let it stand for an hour or so if you have the time.

Fill the pan(s) about ¾ full (do not overfill) and bake in the low oven, about 1 hour 15 minutes for the small pans, or 1 ½ hours for the large, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool in the pans on a rack before turning out.

This is delicious as is, but can be iced with a simple butter glaze or buttercream if you like. It keeps, wrapped, very well.

Note: If you cannot find all-fat salt pork, buy a larger amount of regular salt pork and cut off the lean, reserving for another use. You may also be able to find salted fat back, now being made as a kind of substitute for all-fat salt pork, which is disappearing rapidly (traditionally, fatback is unsalted).

                                                               

Molasses: Spice up the Holidays

New England is one of the probably two places in the country (the other being the South) where molasses is still used in everyday cooking and baking, not just for the occasional batch of gingerbread or cut-out holiday cookie. These, of course, are very good, and gingerbread with whipped cream and a thin chocolate sauce is a favorite winter dessert of mine. But New Englanders eat molasses, to borrow a phrase from Dickens, all the year ‘round, in baked beans, Indian pudding, a portfolio of steamed puddings (including, of course, plum pudding), Boston Brown Bread, date nut bread, buckwheat pancakes, and loads of other traditional dishes.

It’s interesting that molasses has remained so popular despite its high price and the wide availability of a local sweetener, maple syrup (now expensive, but until recent decades quite cheap) and, of course, the ubiquitous white cane sugar (now cheap, but once expensive). Price is not the point, but rather, flavor. Sugar is just sweet; maple syrup is, well, maple-y and a tad delicate, requiring quite a lot to make an impression. Molasses is intense, robust, viscous like honey, and has an open-hearted affinity for spice. It works where other sweeteners don’t, and has great cross-over applicability in hearty, savory dishes such as stews and chilis, and as a color-enhancing glaze for meat and poultry. It is also a fine addition to cocktails and breads (including the famous Anadama).

Like brown sugar and maple syrup, molasses is available in grades of flavor or refinement. Generally available are two, a light and a dark (sometimes called robust  or full-flavor); a third and the most intense and bitter-edged of all, blackstrap, is more difficult to find. If you are going to have only one on hand—although molasses keeps well without loss of flavor in your pantry—it should probably be the dark. A by-product of sugar-making—each grade is produced from stages of boiling, similar to the process by which grades of maple syrup are produced—molasses may be either sulphured or unsulphured, depending on the age of the sugarcane used in manufacture. For best quality and and flavor, look for unsulphured molasses.

Molasses has the added benefits of being a good source of calcium and minerals, such as potassium, magnesium, and copper. It is high in iron (blackstrap being the highest), second only to beef liver, and does not lose any nutrient power in baking. Cookie? Calf’s liver? You choose. My choice is clear.

Soft Molasses-Spice Cookie-Jar Cookies

This is an adaptation of a recipe I cut out of a magazine 25 years ago or so; I long since transferred it to a card, and don't remember where it originally came from (it's not from the vintage Brer Rabbit cookbook shown in the picture). I have fooled around with it a bit, adding the vinegar and cardamom, increasing the ginger, and, I seem to recall, increasing the egg. Adjust the spice to your own taste; these are strongly spiced, according to mine. Be sure your spices are very fresh. These are excellent out of the oven, and are even better after a little aging in the freezer. Makes about 4 dozen.

½ cup unsalted butter, softened 
1 ½ cups sugar
½ cup dark molasses
2 tea cider vinegar
½ tea salt
2 large eggs
2 ½ tea baking soda
1 T ginger
1 ½ tea cloves
1 ½ tea cinnamon
½ tea cardamom
4 cups a-p flour

1/3 cup additional sugar for rolling

Preheat oven to 350 F.

In the bowl of a standing mixer, cream the butter thoroughly, then add the sugar, beating til fluffy, followed by the molasses and vinegar and salt. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each. Mix the spices in on low. Sift the flour into the dough about a cup at a time, folding in at low speed and stopping when all has been incorporated.

Put the additional 1/3 cup sugar on a sheet of wax paper. With sugared hands, form the dough into balls of about 1 ½” in diameter, and roll them in the sugar. Place them about 2” apart on baking sheets, about 12 to a sheet, and bake for 13-14 minutes, until the cookies have spread into perfect rounds and the tops are nicely cracked. Do not overbake. While the first batch is baking, you can form the second batch, but do not roll them in sugar until you are ready to put them in the oven, or the sugar will melt and the cookies will not get their nicely cracked top.

   

Giving Thanks for the Harvest

 

Thanksgiving is extra-special to Rhode Islanders, especially those who live East of Narragansett Bay. Rhode Island, along with southeastern Massachusetts, was home to the Wampanoag, the native people without whom the Pilgrims would not have survived their first winter or, indeed, had a harvest the following year to celebrate at all. The leader of the Wampanoag, Massasoit, was born near Bristol, RI, the seat and summer residence of Massasoit and likely the place from which he and other Wampanoag walked for two days to join the Pilgrims for a harvest dinner in the fall of 1621. That first harvest was the metaphorical seed of all other harvests since enjoyed by every one of us migrants to this country.

Little is known about what was eaten at that dinner, but we do have one first-person account, that of Edward Winslow:

“Our harvest being gotten in, our governour sent foure men on fowling, that so we might after a speciall manner rejoyce together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labours ; they foure in one day killed as much fowle, as with a little helpe beside, served the Company almost a weeke, at which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Armes, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoyt, with some ninetie men, whom for three dayes we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deere, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governour, and upon the Captaine and others.”

In addition to fowl and venison, they probably enjoyed fish and shellfish, and perhaps some thick jonnycakes, again thanks to the Wampanoag and the famous Rhode Island whitecap flint corn. We can deduce this from the writing of the Pilgrim settlement’s governor, William Bradford:

“They begane now to gather in ye small harvest they had, and to fitte up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health & strenght, and had all things in good plenty; fFor as some were thus imployed in affairs abroad, others were excersised in fishing, aboute codd, & bass, & other fish, of which yey tooke good store, of which every family had their portion. All ye somer ther was no want.  And now begane to come in store of foule, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees).  And besids water foule, ther was great store of wild Turkies, of which they tooke many, besids venison, &c. Besids, they had about a peck a meale a weeke to a person, or now since harvest, Indean corn to yt proportion.”

As for vegetables, historians believe the first Thanksgiving included squash, pumpkins, onions, carrots, and cabbage, but not yet another great Rhode Island crop, potatoes. Still, not much has changed at the Thanksgiving table these 387 years later, and we are eating many of the same things. But a look back at the growing season shows a harvest that the Pilgrims, and even the wise Massasoit, could scarcely have imagined. Happy Thanksgiving.

___

I'll be away for the holiday, and will return to LC Mornings in two weeks.