Pilgrim cooks hollowed out small pumpkins, filled them with sliced apples, sugar, spices and milk.  After placing the stem cap back on the pumpkin, it was buried in hot ashes of the cooking fire and baked until tender. Squash and pumpkin quickly became diet staples amongst the settlers. 

The Pilgrims invited local Narragansett Indians for their first Thanksgiving feast, to share a bounty of fruit, meat and vegetables that wouldn’t have been possible without their neighbors’ help.  The previous winter, these early settlers turned up their noses at such long-storing foods as squash, pumpkin, dent corn and pemmican, a dried paste of ground berries and meat from any wild animal.  And, the Pilgrims went hungry, until they were forced to consume the gifts from their Native American neighbors.  When summer came, the colonists planted seeds given to them, harvested large crops and tried to create foods like the ones they used to eat in the British Isles.