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Unexpected Explosions,
Renaissance Water Wings,
Captain Smith’s Disappointment,
A Remedy for Freckles,
Montezuma’s Hors d’Oeuvres,
and A Bargain with the Devil
I’d like to coin a new term: Cucurbitacean (kyoo-kur-bit-a-se-en) n. A person who regards pumpkins and squashes with deep, often rapturous love.
AMY GOLDMAN
In 1699, Paul Dudley, Massachusetts judge and long-distance member of the British Royal Society, came upon a stray pumpkin vine in his pasture. Left to itself, he noted in a letter to the Society’s Philosophical Transactions, the pumpkin grew until it “ran along over several fences and spread over a large piece of ground far and wide,” generating in the process 260 pumpkins, not counting the small ones, or the unripe.
It’s not recorded what Mr. Dudley did with his serendipitous pumpkins, but he doubtless put them to good use, since colonial New Englanders are said to have used more pumpkins in more ways than anyone else before or since. Boston, before it was Beantown, was Pumpkinshire, and New England VIPs, by the mid-nineteenth century, were boastfully known as big pumpkins. It just goes to show what a pumpkin can do.
The prolific Dudley pumpkin and offspring were cucurbits, members of the large and nightmarishly complex Cucurbitaceae family. Prominent pumpkin relatives include squash, cucumbers, melons, and gourds, plus a few off-the-wall distant cousins, such as Benincasa hispida, the wax gourd, the waxy cuticle of which can be scraped off and used to make candles, and Luffa cylindrica, from whose dried fruits trendy bathers acquire their luffa (or loofah) sponges. Pumpkins and squashes, so closely interconnected that many promiscuously interbreed to form misshapen but usually edible “squumpkins,” have bewildered botanists for centuries.
Common garden classification, which inconveniently bears little resemblance to accepted botanical order, divides the multitudinous squashes into summer and winter varieties. Summer squashes ripen in summer, have delicate edible shells and seeds, and should be eaten hot off the vine, since they have generally poor keeping qualities. Examples are the yellow crook-neck, the bush scallop or pattypan, and the ubiquitous zucchini. Winter squashes ripen in the fall, have tough inedible shells and large hard seeds, and store well for periods of several months. Examples are the acorn, butternut, and Hubbard squashes, the spaghetti squash, and the orange-topknotted turban squash.
Pumpkins, botanically lumped with the summer squashes, behave persistently like winter squashes, and many early naturalists and travelers seem to have used the name “pumpkin” simply to indicate any fruit inordinately big and round. As late as 1885, French seed house Vilmorin-Andrieux listed a long string of vegetable behemoths in The Vegetable Garden under the heading “Pumpkins,” stating: “Under this name, which does not correspond to any botanical division, are grouped a certain number of varieties of Cucurbita maxima, which are remarkable for the great size of their fruit.” Included are the mammoth pumpkin; the huge Hubbard squash; the Valparaiso squash, shaped like an immense lemon; the chestnut squash, round and brick red; and the turban gourd.
More discriminating taxonomists these days sort the edible squashes into four basic species. Cucurbita pepo, noted for pentagonal stems with prickly spines, encompasses all the summer squashes, field pumpkins, acorn squashes, spaghetti squashes, and miscellaneous gourds. C. maxima (round stems) includes the banana, buttercup, Hubbard, mammoth, and turban squashes, and the giant pumpkins, now so popular in pumpkin-growing contests. C. moschata (pentagonal smooth stems) includes the butternut squash and the golden cushaw; and C. mixta (now often argyrosperma), the white and green cushaws and the Tennessee Sweet Potato squash.
Amid all this variety — squashes come in an immense array of shapes (many bizarre) and in colors ranging from tan, cream and orange to blue, black and salmon pink — pumpkins distinguish themselves in the matter of sheer size. Joshua Hempstead, an eighteenth-century Connecticut colonist, noted in his diary for 1721: “Wednesd. 20th: saw a pumpkin 5 foot 11 inches Round.” Like Joshua, few of us can resist the unusually enormous — or, apparently, keep ourselves from getting into fights over the precise enormity of it, which is why Sir Hugh Beaver in 1955 instituted the Guinness Book of World Records. He hoped by providing incontrovertible data to eliminate brawling in pubs.
Surprisingly, Thomas Jefferson, a man obsessed with size, seems never to have measured a pumpkin. Jefferson in the 1780s was engaged in the scientific equivalent of a pub brawl with Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, over — continentally speaking — whose was bigger than whose. Buffon, in his Natural History, published in forty-four volumes between 1749 and 1809, insisted that America was degenerate, its native inhabitants, animals, and plants all smaller, weaker, and generally punier than their European counterparts. Incensed, Jefferson countered with black bears, beavers, elk, and moose, all far larger than the next-best European equivalents, and dispatched Lewis and Clark on their cross-country expedition with instructions to find something huge to end the argument — ideally, a living mammoth.
The pumpkin, however — even though Jefferson planted eight acres of them on each of his plantations for feeding his livestock — seems never to have crossed his mind as a counter in the size debate. Perhaps the Jeffersonian pumpkins were just too small.
The modern obsession with giant pumpkins has its roots in the competitive state agricultural fairs of the nineteenth century, where farmers and gardeners vied to win prizes for the biggest and the best. The giant pumpkin that first won America’s fancy, according to Amy Goldman and Victor Schrager, authors of The Compleat Squash (2004), was an import from France, a variety of C. maxima known as the Jaune Gros de Paris or Large Yellow Paris. Among the first to grow these in the United States was Henry David Thoreau who, having obtained seeds from the U.S. Patent Office, managed to produce a 123½-pounder, with which he won a prize at the Middlesex Fair. He subsequently sold his “squash” to a buyer who planned to make a profit by selling the seeds for ten cents apiece.
Soon renamed the Mammoth, the Jaune Gros rapidly became ubiquitous in American gardens. In 1875 the delighted Mr. James Rister of Bethany, Missouri, wrote to seedsman J. J. H. Gregory, from whom he had purchased seeds of the “Mammoth French Squash”: “I must brag a little, for I believe from the seed I had of you I raised the largest Squash in the world; it weighed over 300 pounds!”
In 1900, William Warnock, a carriage maker and hobby gardener from Goderich, Ontario, topped all previous records with a 400-pounder, a pumpkin so remarkable that it and Warnock were invited to the Paris World’s Fair. Four years later, Warnock surpassed himself with a 403-pound pumpkin, exhibited in the Palace of Agriculture at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. (That same fair gave us the ice-cream cone, a re-enactment of the Boer War that included a horseman leaping from a height of 35 feet into a pool of water, and a lecture by fruit specialist J. T. Stinson in which attendees were first introduced to the maxim “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”) Warnock’s 403-pound record was to stand for the next seventy-five years.
Mammoth cultivars proliferated in the interim, among them the Hundred Weight, the Mammoth Fifty Dollar, and Landreth’s Yellow Monster. None, despite their hefty names, managed to outweigh Warnock’s prize — until Howard Dill (thereafter nicknamed “Moby Dill”) of Windsor, Nova Scotia, through a process of crossbreeding and selection, created the blimp-like Dill’s Atlantic Giant. In 1980, an Atlantic Giant hit a record-breading 459 pounds; in 1981, one reached 493½.
Giant pumpkins today have passed the 500-, 1000-, and 1,500-pound marks, with apparently no end in sight. (The world champion as of 2010 weighed in at 1,810½ pounds — approximately the weight of a Volkswagen Beetle.) According to horticulturists, the phenomenal size of recent cultivars results from a combination of genetic change and improved culture techniques. Size in pumpkins is ultimately determined at the cellular level. Large-fruited varieties have longer periods of cell division and thus more cells than smaller varieties; and those cells continue to expand in size after cell division comes to a halt. Between these two phenomena, C. maxima can pack on fifty pounds a day.
Great Pumpkins
The pumpkin is an American icon. It has been immortalized in prose and poetry by such literary greats as Mother Goose, Washington Irving, John Greenleaf Whittier, and L. Frank Baum, and few autumns pass without somebody quoting James Whitcomb Riley’s colloquial tribute to the time “when the frost is on the punkin.” Henry David Thoreau tossed it a left-handed compliment, reflecting on the solitary banks of Walden Pond that he would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to himself than on a velvet cushion and be crowded; and in 1697, master storyteller Charles Perrault provided his Cinderella with the best of both, transforming a solitary pumpkin into a velvet-cushioned coach to carry her in cucurbital elegance to the prince’s ball.
Since 1959 we’ve been able to sympathize each Halloween with Charles Schultz’s character Linus, patiently waiting for the Great Pumpkin to rise out of the pumpkin patch and fly through the air, delivering toys to all the good children in the world.
Best of all the pumpkin tales, however, may be one of Aesop’s fables. It tells of a man who lay beneath an oak tree, criticizing the Creator for hanging a tiny acorn on a huge tree, but an enormous pumpkin on a slender vine. Then, the story goes, an acorn fell and hit him on the nose.
Giant pumpkins aren’t pretty. Most have lost their bright pumpkin orange, due to a heavy influx of squash genes, and none are symmetrically round. The larger a pumpkin gets, the greater its tendency to suffer from a vegetable version of secretarial spread. Crushed by gravity, real behemoths slump, sag, and ooze “like Jabba the Hutt reclining on his divan,” writes Susan Warren in Backyard Giants (2007).
The very earliest cucurbits — probably originating in Central America — were small. They were also bitter, and were most likely valued by early eaters for their protein- and oil-rich seeds. Cultivation of squash and pumpkins dates back at least nine thousand years, judging by scattered remains of seeds and stems found in prehistoric caves in the Tamaulipas mountains of Mexico, and they are thought to have been the first domesticated of the “Indian triad” — squash, beans, and maize — that formed the basis of pre-Columbian Indian diet in both North and South America.
By the arrival of the Europeans, selection had produced squashes sizeable and succulent enough to attract notice. Hernando de Soto, cruising Tampa Bay in 1539, wrote that “beans and pumpkins were in great plenty; both were larger and better than those of Spain; the pumpkins when roasted had nearly the taste of chestnuts.” Coronado saw “melons” (probably squash) on a gold-scouting expedition through the American Southwest, Cartier noted “gros melons” (probably pumpkins) in Canada in 1535, and Samuel de Champlain remarked on the “citroules” (squash?) of New England during his voyage of 1605. Columbus’s account of his first voyage mentions Cuban fields planted with “calebazzas,” or gourds, which were more likely a hard-shelled winter squash.
Pumpkins, though you wouldn’t think so to thump upon them, are amazingly malleable: a growing pumpkin encased in a box will obligingly turn itself into a cube. (Japanese growers have exploited this tendency to grow cuboidal watermelons in boxes, which stack efficiently for shipping.) They’re not, however, infinitely plastic. The giant pumpkin, if it overreaches itself, can literally explode. Too much rain, for example, makes the growing pumpkin swell too fast, exerting pressure on weak spots in the rind, and causing it eventually and abruptly to crack open.
Botanical consensus is that the gourd grown in ancient and medieval Europe (Lagenaria) is of African origin and reached Asia and the Americas more than 10,000 years ago, most likely by simply floating across the ocean. Ancient Old World mentions of “squash” — those, for example, supposedly grown in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon — probably refer to Lagenaria siceraria, or bottle gourds. Some of these are edible, and it was likely a tasty Lagenaria that the Romans consumed, immature, doused with vinegar and mustard. Roman gardeners also grew gourds for show, in “grotesque forms” up to nine feet long, and Pliny the Elder mentions that gourd vines make a nice shade plant in gardens, when trained over roofs and trellises.
The uses of gourds were legion. Pliny mentions gourds as containers for turpentine, olive oil, honey, wine, and water; and Columella, in his first-century agricultural treatise De Re Rustica, says gourds were used as floats for teaching boys how to swim. Gourds are popularly called “marine pumpkins,” writes Giacomo Castelvetro in The Fruits, Herbs, and Vegetables of Italy (1614), “because they are used by inexperienced swimmers, scared of drowning, who strap a whole dried gourd under their chest to keep from sinking into the sea. Small children learn to swim in the rivers with them.” In his Dictionarium Botanicum, or a Botanical Dictionary for the Use of the Curious in Husbandry and Gardening (1728), Richard Bradley describes the Fishermen’s Gourd used in Italy to catch ducks: apparently these were large-size gourds, big enough to fit helmet-style over a man’s head. They were fashioned with eyeholes; wearers submerged themselves sneakily in the water and grabbed ducks by the legs.
American natives similarly put Lagenaria siceraria to good use. John White, artist, sole surviving Roanoke colonist, and grandfather of Virginia Dare (the first English baby born in the New World), mentions in an account of 1585 that the local Indians used gourds as water buckets and as rattles (which they fastened on a stick and used to “make merri”). Adriaen van der Donck, in his Description of the New Netherlands (1655), describes gourds as “the common water-pail of the natives,” some half a bushel in size. According to John Lawson, early eighteenth-century planters used these same gourds set on poles as purple-martin houses, since the martins, being “very warlike” birds, would scare away the crows.
The American pumpkin and squash admittedly took a bit of getting used to. Some initial disappointments clearly arose from dashed expectations: many newcomers thought that the native cucurbits were a form of melon. Captain John Smith mentions a fruit like a muskmelon grown by the Virginia Indians, only “lesse and worse.” It was almost certainly a squash, and “worse” is an understandable reaction if you bit a squash while hoping for melon. The New England settlers deemed the Narragansett askutasquash “uncivilized to contemplate,” and the squash-and-seafood chowder offered them by hospitable Indian cooks they damned as “the meanest of God’s blessings.”
The New England settlers deemed the Narragansett askutasquash “uncivilized to contemplate.”
Edward Johnson, Massachusetts colonist and militia captain, wrote an early History of New-England in 1654 in which he refers to the new land as a “howling Desart” and points out how clever it was of the Lord “to hide from the Eyes of his people the difficulties they are to encounter . . . that they might not thereby be hindered from taking the worke in hand.” Among these difficulties were wolves and bears, thickets, awful weather, earthquakes, and “Pomkins and Squashes,” which is what the “poore people” had to eat instead of anything nice.
The genial Dutch of New Netherlands, on the other hand, found the local quaasiens “a delightful fruite,” greatly favored by women because it was easy to cook. Traveller John Josselyn praised the squash in his New England’s Rarities Discovered (1672), a volume that includes his “rude and undigested” observations of American topography, culture, and animal and plant life, chronological highlights of New England history, a “Description of an Indian Squa,” and a note on a “pineapple” which, when picked, erupted into a horde of angry wasps. The squash, he says, is “a kind of Melon or rather Gourd for they oftentimes degenerate into gourds; some of these are green, some yellow, some longish like a gourd, others round like an apple; all of them pleasant food boyled and buttered, and seasoned with spice.”
Native American gardens offered many varieties of squash. The Northeastern tribes grew pumpkins, yellow crooknecks, pattypans, Boston marrows — perhaps the oldest squash in America still in commercial production — and turban squashes; Southern tribes raised winter crooknecks, cushaws, and green-and-white-striped sweet potato squashes. The Indian name for the fruit, variously rendered as askutasquash, isquotersquash, or simply askoot, translated as “something to be eaten raw,” probably the earliest, but least satisfactory, means of consumption.
Porter and Pumperkin
Pumpkins, like practically everything else, can be turned into alcohol. The earliest American poem, written in 1630 by an anonymous Pilgrim, includes the verse: “If Barley be wanting to make into Malt / We must be contented and think it no Fault / For we can make liquor to sweeten our Lips / Of Pumpkins and Parsnips and Walnut-Tree Chips.” The poem, titled “New England’s Annoyances,” is an exercise in sarcasm: the bottom line is that the Pilgrims missed real beer. The lousy substitute involved persimmons, hops, maple syrup, and pumpkin mash.
George Washington, who brewed his own beer, experimented with pumpkin porter, and Virginia planter Landon Carter invented an alcoholic pumpkin beverage that he seemed quite pleased with and christened “pumperkin.”
Common practice by the time the Mayflower landed was to bake winter squashes and pumpkins whole in the ashes of the fire, then cut them open and serve them moistened with animal fat and maple syrup or honey. The earliest Pilgrim-invented pumpkin pie was a variation on this theme: the top was sliced off a pumpkin; the seeds scraped out; the cavity filled with apples, sugar, spices, and milk; the top popped back on, and the stuffed fruit baked whole. By the next century, the more classic Thanksgiving dinner version in a crust had appeared. The “Pompkin Pie” recipe in Amelia Simmons’s 1796 American Cookery calls for a pudding-like filling of milk, “pompkin,” eggs, molasses, allspice, and ginger baked in a “tart paste,” or crust, of flour and butter.
Yankee culinary ingenuity also devised pumpkin stews and soups (with corn, peas, and beans), sauce (served on meat and fish), porridge, pancakes, bread, butter, and, with much effortful boiling, molasses. Pumpkin was cut in strips and dried to make a sort of pumpkin jerky.
The cucurbits also had a range of medicinal uses. As early as 1611, a Miss Elizabeth Skinner of Roanoke, Virginia, recommended squash seeds pounded with meal to remove freckles and other unsightly “spottes” from the face. The Indians ate squash and pumpkin seeds as a worm expellant, and whole squash (in quantity) for snakebite. The settlers drank pulverized squash and pumpkin seeds in water for bladder trouble and made tea of ground pumpkin stems to treat “female ills.” The various pains of childbirth, toothache, and chilblains were thought to abate if the sufferer chewed on a squash, and the colonists of Jamestown used boiled squash mashed into paste as a poultice for sore eyes.
A hefty number of pumpkins and squashes were needed to supply all these dietary and medicinal needs, and the colonial cucurbit soon outgrew the kitchen garden and was elevated to the status of field crop. It usually sat in its field until October, bulging ripely over the remains of withered vines and stalks, and as such was fair game for the natural disasters recorded in colonial histories as “pumpkin floods.”
Floods of any kind are rare in October, a notoriously dry month nationwide, but occasional torrential downpours do occur, with accompanying high water and river overflow. Such floods occurred at least twice in the 1780s, once overrunning the pumpkin fields of Maine and New Hampshire, the following year washing out the pumpkins of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Pumpkins, for all their apparent solidity, float, and the unexpected October overflows carried off enough of them that the floods were named for their buoyant orange cargo. In years without floods, pumpkins were harvested more conventionally, stored in straw in the root cellar, and served up in pies for Thanksgiving dinner, a holiday scornfully referred to by nonparticipating Episcopalians as St. Pumpkin’s Day.
Europeans were not initially taken with American cucurbits. Gardening manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reiterate that the various “pompions” were principally a food of the poor, who planted them on dunghills. Summer squash reached England in the late seventeenth century, where it was ungratefully dubbed “harrow marrow.” (The source of the English marrow, meaning squash, is obscure; one guess is that it was thought to have the taste or consistency of bone marrow, a common ingredient in eighteenth-century recipes.) In France, squash seeds stuck in the gullets of the prized Strasbourg geese, destined for pâté de foie gras, and squash on the whole managed to offend the influential horticulturalist Olivier de Serries, who had obtained his garden specimens from Spain. He referred to the new vegetable as “Spain’s revenge.”
Pumpkins float. October rain and river overflow can wash them out of their fields, creating “pumpkin floods.”
Squash and pumpkins, however, grew on people. Washington and Jefferson were both squash growers: the Monticello gardens featured pumpkins, “white pumpkins,” and “cymlings,” the last an early name for the bush scallop or pattypan. Cymlings or simnels, according to Virginian John Banister in his Natural History (1690), were so called for their resemblance to a traditional Lenten or simnel cake, a round cake decorated with balls of almond paste around the outer edge. John Gerard called them buckler squash, from their resemblance to bucklers, the small round shields favored by medieval swordsmen.
Many new squash varieties were picked up in the nineteenth century by sea captains in the West Indies or South America and brought back to enrich the gardens of their home ports. By such routes arrived the Valparaiso, Marblehead, pineapple, and Hubbard squashes. The Hubbard squash, cunningly described as “turned up like a Chinese shoe,” and said when baked to taste like a sweet potato, had a long run as America’s favorite winter squash.
It was formally introduced to American gardens by Marblehead, Massachusetts, seedsman James J. H. Gregory, who traced its homely history in The Magazine of Horticulture, December 23, 1857:
“Of the origin of the Hubbard squash we have no certain knowledge. The facts relative to its cultivation in Marblehead are simply these. Upwards of twenty years ago, a single specimen was brought into town, the seed from which was planted in the garden of a lady, now deceased; a specimen from this yield was given to Captain Knott Martin, of this town, who raised it for family use for a few years, when it was brought to our notice in the year 1842 or ’43. We were first informed of its good qualities by Mrs. Elizabeth Hubbard, a very worthy lady, through whom we obtained seed from Cpt. Martin. As the squash up to this time had no specific name to designate it from other varieties, my father termed it the ‘Hubbard Squash.’”
Gregory’s business fairly boomed after the acquisition of Hubbard squash seed, and Gregory went on to become something of an authority on squashes, publishing in 1893 an informative work titled Squashes: How to Grow Them.
Most successful among squashes today is probably the zucchini, which became popular in American gardens in the 1950s, reintroduced to North America from Italy. The Italians had acquired the zucchini in mysteriously undocumented fashion more than three hundred years ago and formed an immediate affinity for it. The name is a derivative of an Italian word meaning sweetest. It’s also legendarily productive: six zucchini plants, one expert figures, yield an average of fifty pounds of fruit per summer, and that’s a conservative estimate. “The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini,” humorist Dave Barry writes. “Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden menacing other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.”
“The first zucchini I ever saw,” says one author, “I killed it with a hoe.”
Much of the squash-breeding effort in this country over the past twenty years has been devoted to zucchini, which is now available in a rainbow of colors other than the standard flecked green. It appears internationally on the tables of France, as the courgette; England, as the baby marrow; and Spain, as the calabacin. Still, it’s not a squash for everybody. “The first zucchini I ever saw,” says author John Gould, “I killed it with a hoe.” Mr. Gould is also down on the pattypan (“a cross between a Scottish curling stone and the end cut from a roast of foam rubber”) and insists that the best use for all squashes is to dry them and hang them from the trees as birdhouses.
A perhaps more acceptable, since less squashlike, alternative is the spaghetti squash or vegetable spaghetti, a variety of C. pepo whose insides, when baked or boiled, unravel into a mass of fine spaghetti-like strands touted as a low-calorie substitute for pasta. A hard-shelled winter squash shaped roughly like a football, the spaghetti squash was originally cultivated in Italy and Spain.
Adventurous squash eaters do not necessarily confine themselves to the conventional fleshy fruits. Squash flowers, especially those of zucchini, pattypan, and summer crookneck squashes, are both edible and flavorful. Friar Bernardino de Sahagún reported squash blossom hors d’oeuvres at Montezuma’s banquet table, though he was regrettably vague about their manner of preparation. These days the blossoms are sautéed, dipped in batter for fritters, or stuffed with rice and meat. The Zunis of the Southwest ate squash blossoms in soup, choosing the large male flowers, which were considered the most delectable.
Prospective soup cooks have a choice between male and female flowers because monoecious plants, such as squashes, pumpkins, cucumbers, and melons, bear both. Dioecious plants, in contrast, segregated like Victorian boarding schools, bear either male or female flowers, never both. This seeming botanical propriety is nature’s way of preventing self-fertilization and promoting the beneficially varied genetic scrambling that is the point of sexual reproduction in the first place. Spinach, asparagus, and holly are all dioecious, which means that to get red berries for your Christmas wreaths, you need a breeding pair of trees.
In monoecious plants, often the male and female flowers mature at different times to encourage cross-fertilization. In squashes, for example, the male flowers, the pollinizers, open first. Male and female flowers are simple to tell apart: the males have straight skinny stems leading directly to the bud; the females have a prominent bulge at the top of the stem adjacent to the petals, containing the ovary. Upon fertilization, this ovary develops into a mature squash or pumpkin.
The Zunis of the Southwest ate squash blossoms in soup, choosing the large male flowers, considered the most delectable.
Squash and pumpkin blossoms are borne on indefatigable vines that given their head will happily overrun one hundred square feet or more of garden. This insidious habit, of particular concern to gardeners with limited growing space, has long been a target of breeders and plant scientists. The results of their professional manipulations are known as bush cultivars, plants in which the internodes — the lengths of stem between leaves — have been drastically shortened. The truncated cultivars take up a quarter, or less, of the space of the standard vines, but in many cases have been found to bear smaller and fewer fruits than their unconfined relatives.
A possible reason for this, researchers suggest, is the reduced photosynthetic area that follows reduction in vine length: shorter vines mean fewer leaves, which in turn means less sunlight-derived energy to fuel the development of fruit. To owners of pocket-handkerchief-sized vegetable plots, however, a small pumpkin is better than no pumpkin at all. Still, even a bush pumpkin can swallow sixty square feet of garden space, so genetics has yet to give us a jack-o’-lantern in a flowerpot.
Not everyone, of course, likes the pumpkin. In the 1890s, New York seedsman and squash activist Peter Henderson began to inveigh against it:
“The pumpkin is yet offered in large quantities for sale in our markets, but it ought to be banished from them as it has been for some time from our garden. But the good lieges of our cities are suspicious in all innovations in what is offered them to eat, and it will be many years yet before the masses will understand the modest and sometimes uncouth looking squash is immeasurably superior for all culinary purposes to the mammoth, rotund pumpkin.”
Over a century later, historian James McWilliams, author of A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (2005), is saying the same. The edible pumpkin, warns McWilliams, may well be headed the way of the passenger pigeon — and the fault can be laid at the feet of grower Jack Howden. In the 1970s, he developed the Howden Field pumpkin — a round, uniformly sized thick-skinned pumpkin — from the less prolific Connecticut Field, the traditional American baking pumpkin. Although they are perfect for jack-o’-lantern carving, porch décor, or flinging into a field via catapult, Howden’s pumpkins, which now dominate the American market, don’t taste all that good.
Jack’s Deal with the Devil
One indisputable advantage of the mammoth pumpkin over the modest squash is its suitability for the carving of jack-o’-lanterns. The jack-o’-lantern arrived in this country in the mid-nineteenth century along with the influx of potato-starved immigrants from Ireland. An old custom of Ireland and Great Britain, it is said to have originated with a blacksmith named Jack, who sold his soul, for a hefty sum, to the Devil. When the Devil came around to collect, Jack weaseled out of the bargain by sneakily trapping him in a pear tree.
This solved matters temporarily, but eventually Jack’s irrevocable and final number came up. Barred from the Pearly Gates for all this truck with the Devil, Jack went straight to hell. The Devil, with the pear tree fresh in his mind, didn’t want Jack around either. Just before the gates of Hell shut him out forever, Jack scooped up a burning coal with half of a turnip that he happened, providentially, to be eating. He has used it as a lantern ever since, while wandering around the earth waiting for Judgment Day. In America, the traditional turnip jack-o’-lantern rapidly gave way to the enormous and irresistible pumpkin.
McWilliams suggests that it’s time we replaced fake pumpkins with real ones. “Some traditions,” he maintains, “like cultivating vegetables to eat, should never be destroyed.”