Pumpkin Largesse and Largness, and a Little Odd Postcard

Combing the internet for little morsels of 19th century pumpkin memory I am struck by usefulness
of having a kitchen filled with women.
As the second article commented, "a pootty consid’r’ble snarl o’gals..."was insurance of a good meal.

From 1838:
"But I am getting before my story. I was wending homeward, and, on arriving, found supper in readiness. The table of mine host literally groaned beneath its accumulated weight. Toast piled in solid cubes, dough-nuts in towering pyramids, huge bowls of apple-sauce, and pumpkin pies of vast diameter, occupied their appropriate stations. 

When I looked upon the latter, covering a platter of a size somewhat less than the bottom of a half-bushel, a remark of my old friend, Mark Newcomb, forced itself upon me. He was an extravagant admirer of this savory article, and one day, after having consumed a scanty portion, he ejaculated with great emphasis, "Oh, that this whole college green was one great pumpkin pie, and I, placed in the centre, was obliged to eat my way out!" 

Gentleman's Magazine -1838 - excerpt from My First School-keeping by E. Pinckney Morton -(memories of being a university student)

From 1825 comes this description of a huge pumpkin pie in a New England home!  

" Now for supper. There being ‘a pootty consid’r’ble snarl o’gals’, I guess, the supper was bravely furnished.  As usual, in America, puddings and pies, vegetables and meat, were all on the table at once.  ‘We aint proud, I guess.’   

Here were ‘sweetmeats,’ i. e. preserved plums; there was a fine goose;    here, was a pumpkin pie, nearly three feet in length, baked in a milk pan; there, a quantity of long, short, and round sauce, or ‘sarse’, i. e. carrots, turnips, and potatoes;    here, were dough nuts, a kind of sweet cake fried in lard; honeycomb, new butter, cheese, rye, and Indian bread, i. e. a bread baked in half-peck loaves, made partly of rye meal, and partly of Indian meal, the meal of Indian wheat or maize; there, a prodigious pumpkin, ‘right out o' the oven, by faith,’ perfuming the whole house, while Mariam stood stirring up the ‘innards;’ pouring in the new milk, with now and then a handful of ‘ ginooine' maple sugar; a spoonful or two of ‘turrible good’ corn-stalk molasses, and a little nutmeg, till every body was impatient for a dip, while it was bubbling and smoking;    his neighbours, all a-tiptoe; and a silver spoon, ‘the only one about,’ going the rounds; with a pretty ‘ respectable’ Indian pudding, a plate of pickles, a tub of milk porridge.”

It was a genuine Yankee supper; and such a one as might be met with, now, at a Quilting, Husking, or Raising, of the northern states.

Earlier in the book:

A new England supper-table; and a genuine Yankee supper may be worth a moment of our time, and half a dozen sweeps of our brush; a supper and a table, such, as were in fashion, half a century ago; and such, as are still to be met with, all over the " Western Country ;" throughout all the woods and " back parts" of America, —with a few variations, from " hasty pudding and molasses, to hog and homony;" from sweet corn, pumpkin pies, and sarse (vegetables); to buckwheat cakes and goose's gravy, — in many of the smaller towns, and over allthe country parts, of New England.

Brother Jonathan: Or, The New Englanders, Volume 1

 By John Neal1825