Thoreau writes in his journal:
Mother says that her father-in-law, Captain Minott, not only used to roast and eat a long row of little wild apples, reaching in a semicircle from jamb to jamb under the andirons on the reddened hearth (I used to buy many a pound of Spanish brown at the stores for mother to redden the jambs and heart with), but he had a quart of new milk regularly placed at the head of his bed, which he drank at many draughts in the course of the night . . .