so than at a later date, when "rye and Indian" took its place, a fortunate choice for a people who, as time went on, ate more and more salt pork and fish.
Game and fresh fish were plentiful in the beginning and poultry used with a freedom that would seem to the farmer of to-day, the maddest extravagance. The English love of good cheer was still strong, and Johnson wrote in his "Wonder-Working Providence": "Apples, pears and quince tarts, instead of their former pumpkin-pies. Poultry they have plenty and great rarity, and in their feasts have not forgotton the English fashion of stirring up their appetites with variety of cooking their food."
Certain New England dishes borrowed from the natives, or invented to meet some emergency, had already become firmly established. Hasty-pudding, made chiefly then as now, from Indian meal, was a favorite supper dish, rye often being used instead, and both being eaten with molasses, and butter or milk. Samp and hominy, or the whole grain, as "hulled corn", had also been borrowed from the Indians, with "succotash", a fascinating combination of young beans and green corn. Codfish made Saturday as sacred as Friday had once been, and baked beans on Sunday morning became an equally inflexible law. Every family brewed its own beer, and when the orchards had grown, made its own cider. Wine and spirits were imported, but rum was made at home, and in the early records of Andover, the town distiller has honorable mention. Butcher's meat was altogether too precious to be often eaten, flocks and herds bearing the highest money value for many years, and game and poultry took the place of it.
