How to Eat a Pumpkin, 1597

"The pulpe of the Pompion is never eaten raw, but boiled... The fruit boiled in milke and buttered, is not onely a good wholesome meate for mans bodie: but being so prepared, is also a most phisicall medicine for such as have an hot stomacke, and the inward parts inflamed. The flesh or pulpe of the same sliced and fried in a pan with butter, is also a good and wholesome meate: but baked with apples in an oven, it doth fill the bodie full of flatuous or windie belchings, and is foode utterly unwholesome for such as live idly; but unto robustious and rusticke people, nothing hurteth that filleth the belly."  

John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes

Try some baked pumpkin! A few windy belchings are sure to enliven your week.

How to Make a Pumpkin Pie, 1670

Still Life with Pies (17th c.) 

"To make a Pompion-Pie. Having your Paste ready in your Pan, put in your Pompion pared and cut in thin slices, then fill up your pie with sharp Apples, and a little Pepper, and a little salt, then close it, and bake it, then butter it, and serve it in hot to the Table." 

Hannah Woolley, The Queen-Like Closet, or Rich Cabinet (1670)

Paraphrase: prepare your pan, pare your pompion, put it in paste with pepper.

How to Make Pumpkin Ale, 1771

Vietz, Icones plantarum (1804)

"Let the Pompion be beaten in a Trough and pressed as Apples. The expressed Juice is to be boiled in a Copper a considerable Time and carefully skimmed that there may be no Remains of the fibrous Part of the Pulp. After that Intention is answered let the Liquor be hopped cooled fermented &c. as Malt Beer." 

American Philosophical Society papers (1771)

This fall, treat yourself to some pumpkin ale-- homebrew of 18th-century American philosophers.