Roasting Pumpkins

[The Walking Dead]

We know Continental soldiers roasted pumpkins so it isn't something new (see below). Does anyone know of a first person account by a Civil War soldier describing how he roasted a pumpkin? Did Civil War soldiers use pumpkins as a cooking pot?


https://www.amrevmuseum.org/living-history-at-home-roasting-a-pumpkin

Joseph Plumb Martin's 1830 Memoir of a Revolutionary Soldier gives readers a first-person account of what life was like as an everyday soldier during the Revolutionary War. He described the hunger he felt in the early days of the Valley Forge encampment in the winter of 1777. Without anything to eat, Plumb Martin turned to half a small pumpkin and a hot rock.
In his memoir, he wrote: "I lay here two nights and one day, and had not a morsel of any thing to eat all the time, save half of a small pumpkin, which I cooked by placing it upon a rock, the skin side uppermost, and making a fire upon it; by the time it was heat through I devoured it with as keen an appetite as I should a pie made of it at some other time."

 

[54th Virginia Reb]

My family had a tradition from the 1850's where they would shoot a quail and freeze it in a empty pumpkin with cold rocks over it as a freezer and then take out the rocks, and cook the quail in the pumpkin over a perfectly lit fire, still do it today, was happening during the Civil War by my family, sort of similar I think.

 

[KianGaf]

Only had pumpkin as a filling in pasta. I must try it on its own , I'd say it good in soup. I like butternut squash and they are available all year round so I'd say pumpkin in fall are good.

 

[Fairfield]

In an older thread on CWT (https://civilwartalk.com/threads/johnny-reb-fighting-on-an-empty-stomach.141098/), @AUG copied out the ACW remembrances in post #4: "Roast pumpkin was a treat, and was ingeniously cooked by roasting whole. A small hole in the side gave access to remove the seed; and we either put in five dollars worth of sugar, one pound, or sorghum molasses. The pumpkin was suspended on a frame by the stem, and then slowly turned until done to perfection."

 

[The Walking Dead]

In an older thread on CWT (https://civilwartalk.com/threads/johnny-reb-fighting-on-an-empty-stomach.141098/), @AUG copied out the ACW remembrances in post #4: "Roast pumpkin was a treat, and was ingeniously cooked by roasting whole. A small hole in the side gave access to remove the seed; and we either put in five dollars worth of sugar, one pound, or sorghum molasses. The pumpkin was suspended on a frame by the stem, and then slowly turned until done to perfection."

Thank you @Fairfield.

 

[donna]

Fairfield great find on pumpkins.