Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "Oldtown Folks" in 1869. She
tells about life in a New England village called Oldtown. The passage below
tells about Thanksgiving preparations in a Massachusetts town.
---------------------------------------------
The making of
pies at this period assumed vast proportions that verged upon the sublime. Pies
were made by forties and fifties and hundreds, and made of everything on the
earth and under the earth.
The pie is an
English institution, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and
burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old
traditional mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that
main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions
to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies,
green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum pies, custard pies, apple pies,
Marlborough-pudding pies – pies with top crusts, and pies without, – pies
adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid
across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of
the feminine mind, when once let loose in a given direction.
Fancy the heat
and vigor of the great pan-formation, when Aunt Lois and Aunt Keziah, and my
mother and grandmother, all in ecstasies of creative inspiration, ran, bustled,
and hurried, – mixing, rolling, tasting, consulting, – alternately setting us
children to work when anything could be made of us, and then chasing us all out
of the kitchen when our misinformed childhood ventured to take too many
liberties with sacred mysteries. Then out we would all fly at the kitchen door,
like sparks from a blacksmith’s window.
