This Indian corn, pounded and boiled until soft, is a dish Captain
Smith eats of with an appetite, provided it is well salted, and
one does not need to be a king's cook in order to make it ready for
the table. The pounding is the hardest and most difficult portion
of the task, for the kernels are exceeding flinty, and fly off at
a great distance when struck a glancing blow.
Nathaniel and I have brought inside our house a large, flat rock,
on which we pound the corn, and one of us is kept busy picking
up the grains that fly here and there as if possessed of an evil
spirit. Newsamp is the name which the savages give to this cooking
of wheat.
I have an idea that when we get a mill for grinding, it will
be possible to break the kernels easily and quickly between the
millstones, without crushing a goodly portion of them to meal.
When the Indian corn is young, that is to say, before it has grown
hard, the ears as plucked from the stalks may be roasted before
the coals with great profit, and when we would give our master
something unusually pleasing, Nathaniel and I go abroad in search
of the gardens made by the savages, where we may get, by bargaining,
a supply of roasting ears.
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