The Great Pumpkin

"All pumpkins are squashes but not all squashes are pumpkins". No, it isn’t how Tolstoy began his epic on gourds - it is the advice a nameless interviewee on KCRW’s Good Food used to explain the difference between squash and pumpkin. To use another literary cliché, what we talk about when we talk about pumpkins, is the Curcurbita Pepo. Pepos, as enthusiasts refer to them, are the orange fleshed squash we call pumpkin.

Believed to have originally cultivated in either Mexico or Central America about 6,000 years ago, the Pepos family also includes the rightfully maligned zucchini, acorn, spaghetti and crookneck squashes. But it was the highly adaptable pumpkins that had disseminated throughout the Americas and greeted Columbus when he arrived in the DR. Seeds made there way back to the old world were grown next to the familiar gourd, quickly adapted to their new environment. By the time the pilgrims had settled Virginia and Massachusetts 100 years later, the orange squashes were a familiar sight to the hungry but surprisingly neophobic English settlers - who were so happy to see a foodstuff they recognized from their homeland - they used pumpkins in everything - baking, frying, mashing, stewing, souping and most likely brewing the pumpkin during the early years of the Colonies.

More valuable than the orange flesh of the fruit, which is culinarily treated like a vegetable, were its seeds, the pepitos. Pumpkin seeds - eaten as a snack throughout the world - are sold with unbelievable alacrity and availability on street corners in Mexico. Pepitos were valuable to early American civilizations as an easily stored, mobile, high-energy food: 50% Fat and 35% protein making them a pre-Columbian powerbar of sorts.

Here and now, the pumpkin is revered for its flesh. According to the USDA, which sweetly lists the commodity as ‘pumkin’, it isn’t often you see terms of endearment on government generated spreadsheets. The supply of pumpkin works out to about 4.8 pounds per US resident. Although the Department of Agriculture doesn’t separate from edible and ornamental uses, food wise most us are more familiar with the canned variety than the different varieties of fresh pumpkins.

Libby is the prevalent brand, the company contracts over 4,000 acres of prime Midwestern farm land to grow the ‘Dickinson’ pumpkin. Denizens of natural food markets might be more familiar with Corvallis, Oregon’s – Farmer’s Market brand. Either is fine, years ago, in a period of my life after I formally renounced all processed foods, I made my own pumpkin puree; dozens of dollars and hours of washing, slicing, boiling and food milling yielded a product - eerily familiar to the contents of a can, then available for about a dollar.

More iconic than a Libby’s label are the Halloween Jack-o-Lanterns, a tradition believed to have been inspired by Washington Irving’s headless horseman in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The Halloweenie carve-able pumpkins sold in October belong to the CurcurbiaMoshchata, C. Mixta and the big ones usually are members of the aptly named C. Maxima family.

In the US most pumpkin is purchased and consumed in the fall, usually in the weeks leading up to Halloween and Thanksgiving. For cultures that don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, the pumpkin is used either in season or year around. For more information on how the pumpkin is used around the world, see the previous post.







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