by Rebecca Rupp
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.
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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.”
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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 tha
n 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.
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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.
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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.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In Which
RADISHES
IDENTIFY
WITCHES
plus
The Awful Fruits of Adultery,
A Japanese Journey,
German Beer Gardens,
A Squint-Eyed Monk,
Dutch Breakfasts, and
A Heroine with Very Long Hair
Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about the revolution than we used to be.
E. B. WHITE
Here in America, today’s garden radish is barely considered a food. Instead, we know them as the peppery little red-skinned balls commonly relegated to the level of garnishes, or casually added, sliced, to salad. This is a comedown for the radish, which for much of its vegetable history has been admired, important, and huge.
The cultivated radish — Raphanus sativus — was formerly believed to have originated in China, where the bulk of wild radish relatives are found today. Recent genetic analyses, however, indicate multiple loci of domestication scattered across Europe, Eurasia, and Asia — in other words, lots of people in wildly widespread locations liked it enough to dig it up, take it home, and attempt to improve upon it.
No one is yet quite sure just what they first brought home. One candidate for the ancestral radish is Raphanus raphanistrum, wild radish or charlock, an invasive native of Asia, reportedly collected and used in early Europe as a potherb. Another guess is Raphanus maritimus, the so-called sea radish, native to the European seacoast — or possibly a hybrid of the two, or a hybrid of one or the other with another ancient radish, now extinct.
Like the multitudinous cabbages, the turnip, and the horseradish, the radish is a member of the Cabbage or Mustard family, Brassicaceae. Its relationship to other Brassicas is close enough for succ
essful crossing, though such crosses (like those of zebras with Shetland ponies), while possible, are not the natural rule.
The genus name Raphanus comes from the Greek and means “rapidly appearing,” which is no more than simple truth. Radishes, always a good pick for very young or inordinately impatient gardeners, germinate in as little as five days and turn out a crop in three to four weeks. Such rapidity is a prime reason that scientists consider the radish an ideal crop for future spacecraft gardens designed to feed traveling astronauts. The common name radish comes from the Latin radix, meaning root, which is somewhat less accurate. The edible portion of the radish, as in the turnip and rutabaga, is a mix of root and hypocotyl, the starch-stuffed base of the stem.
The peppery taste that we associate with radishes is the result of a defensive chemical reaction, initiated when the radish is bitten, which radishes don’t like. Once radish cells are disrupted, a class of enzymes called glucosinolases comes in contact with sulfur- and nitrogen-containing precursors to form isothiocyanates. The effect, depending on the radish, is anything from a tang to a burn, though even the most vicious of radishes is mild compared to such radish relatives as horseradish and wasabi, whose volatile isothiocyanates can make the sinuses cringe.
Pliny condemns radishes as “a vulgar article of diet” since “all radishes breed wind wonderful much, and provoke a man that eateth of them to belch” — though he adds that this apparently persistent Roman problem could be minimized if a meal of vulgar radish is rapidly followed by a serving of half-ripe olives. The Greeks, he continues slightingly, were inordinately fond of radishes, as evidenced by the silly votive offerings in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, which included radishes made of solid gold, and a Greek author named Moschion apparently wrote an entire book devoted to the radish, which Pliny does not say but implies was a waste of time.
