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A Word About Pumpkins
by Andy Griffin
Mariquita Farm
Organically Grown Vegetables, Berries and Herbs
P.O. Box 2065 Watsonville, CA 95077
(831) 761-3226
www.mariquita.com
 Pies, like Halloween, came to America from Europe. I have hard lots of
horror stories over the years about homemade pumpkin pies that turned
out stringy, watery, tasteless and ugly. The idea has grown up that
some pumpkins are eating pumpkins and some are just for Halloween.
There's a certain amount of truth to this idea but remember that the
Native Americans who first developed pumpkins as a crop would have eaten
the pumpkin at all stages of its life.
The thick, fat pumpkin seeds are rich in nutritious oils and some of
them would have been saved to toast over the fire for a tasty meal
during the long, cold winters on the east coast. Pumpkin seeds would
have been sprouted too, giving people starving for fresh vegetables a
bite of greenery in the late winter or early spring. After the year's
crop had been planted out and the pumpkin vines began creeping across
the earth, the first golden flowers could be eaten in salads followed by
the little green developing fruits. The pumpkin is a close cousin to
the zucchini, the crookneck, and the patty pan squash and, while green
and tender, was eaten raw by the Native Americans. Our word "squash",
in fact, comes to us from the Naragansett word "asquutasquash" meaning
uncooked.
 In an odd symmetry of language our word pumpkin comes to us by
circuitous logic from the ancient Greek word for "cooked." "Pumpkin" is
an English corruption of the French word "pompion" which in Old French
had been "pompon" and earlier "popon." The earliest franco phones were
simply putting a gallic twist on the Latin word "pepon" which was a
cognate of a Greek word I can't type out but which meant cooked. It
remains a distinguishing characteristic of the squash that we have come
to call pumpkins that to be enjoyed at their maturity they must be
cooked. The Latin word "pepon" survives as the botanical Latin name
"Cucurbita pepo" for one of the many groups within the Cucurbita family.
Nowadays we use the word pumpkin most often to describe hard squash
that are either reminiscent of the jack o' lantern pumpkin in color or
in shape. Some pumpkins like the white "Lumina" pumpkins are pumpkin
shaped and pumpkin sized but come from the Cucurbita maxima group, like
hubbard squash. Tan colored pumpkins like the "cheese" or the "Long
Island" belong to Cucurbita moschata group like butternut squash. The
"potato pumpkin", an heirloom east coast variety, is from the Cucurbita
mixta along with various Hopi squashes. The long and the short of it is
that every pumpkin is a squash to a botanist but not every squash is a
pumpkin to a chef.
 Confusion reigns over the pumpkin patch because two types of pumpkin
which look awfully similar taste a lot different. The New England sugar
pie pumpkin is a small but heavy round orange pumpkin that has a nice
flavor. The Connecticut field pumpkin is a larger orange squash,
typically oblong in shape, that superficially looks the same but has no
flavor. The Indians used the Connecticut field type for the production
of seeds which they treated as a grain. European settlers used this type
of pumpkin first as livestock feed and later as a seasonal ornament.
For your dinner we will be bringing sugar pie pumpkins, Rouge Vif
d'etampe pumpkins, lumina pumpkins, cheese pumpkins and mosqué du
provence pumpkins. For carving we will be bringing a few Jack o'Lantern
pumpkins. They are all beautiful if you just want to look at them for a
while before using them. They've just been picked and should last for
months.
Copyright 2001 Andy Griffin
Mariquita Farm
Used with permission
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