Samp and samp porridge were soon abundant dishes. Samp is Indian corn pounded to a coarsely ground powder. Roger Williams wrote of it:—
"Nawsamp is a kind of meal pottage unparched. From this the English call their samp, which is the Indian corn beaten and boiled and eaten hot or cold with milk and butter, and is a diet exceedingly wholesome for English bodies."
The Swedish scientist, Professor Kalm, told that the Indians gave him "fresh maize-bread, baked in an oblong shape, mixed with dried huckleberries, which lay as close in it as raisins in a plum pudding."
Roger Williams said that sukquttahhash was "corn seethed like beans." Our word "succotash" we now apply to corn cooked with beans. Pones were the red men's appones.
The love of the Indians for "roasting ears" was quickly shared by the white man. In Virginia a series of plantings of corn were made from the first of April to the last of June, to afford a three months' succession of roasting ears.
The traveller, Strachey, writing of the Indians in 1618, said: "They lap their corn in rowles within the leaves of the come and so boyle yt for a dayntie." This method of cooking we have also retained to the present day.
It seemed to me very curious to read in Governor Winthrop's journal, written in Boston about 1630, that when corn was "parched," as he called it, it turned inside out and was "white and floury within"; and to think that then little English children were at that time learning what pop-corn was, and how it looked when it was parched, or popped.
Hasty pudding had been made in England of wheat-flour or oatmeal and milk, and the name was given to boiled puddings of corn-meal and water. It was not a very suitable name, for corn-meal should never be cooked hastily, but requires long boiling or baking. The hard Indian 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:—