Grange Hall, 1903, Courtesy of National City Public Library
Another installment in our Grange Hall food history series. The documentary history of these rural institutions dates back to just after the end of the US Civil War. We are exploring them as in part important rural culinary spaces for farming communities across the United States. Like churches then, apparently Grange Halls across the country remained customarily segregated. A WPA writing on New Hampshire Grange Hall supper tells us that baked pumpkins had been a popular menu item in that part of New England. One cut off the top of the pumpkin, took out the seeds, and baked the entire pumpkin with milk, a dash cinnamon, nutmeg, and sweetened with maple sugar inside of it for several hours in a hot brick oven . People considered baked pumpkin a “great luxury.”
