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For pottage and puddings and custard and pies,
Our pumpkins and parsnip are common supplies: We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon, If it were not for pumpkins, we should be undoon. Pilgrim rhyme--1630
Squashes originated, like potatoes and tomatoes, in the Americas. (I am beginning to wonder what Europeans ate before they discovered the New World!) Pumpkin derives from the Greek “pepon” which, depending on whom you believe, means either “ripe,” “mellow,” “cooked by the sun,” or “large melon.” Squash derives, more simply, from the Algonquin Indian “askoot asquash” or “eaten green.” So-called “summer” squashes such as zucchini and crookneck are simply those that are harvested at an immature stage, while their skins are still tender. If left to age, they can become almost as thick-skinned and warty as their “winter” counterparts! Native Americans roasted and dried pumpkin strips and used them to make everything from sleeping mats to flour. They also brewed the crushed seeds into a tea to treat such afflictions as edema, gout, kidneystones, and bladder infections. Although Columbus carried pumpkin seeds back with him to Europe, the squashes grown from them were initially fed to pigs! Shakespeare himself did not seem much impressed with the new “fruit.” In the Merry Wives of Windsor, a character says scornfully of Falstaff, “Go to, then: we'll use this unwholesome humidity, this gross watery pumpion. . .” The original Jack-O-Lanterns were not carved from pumpkins. They derived from an Irish fable about a wiley lad called Stingy Jack, who tricked the devil into promising not to take his soul. Unfortunately, however, heaven didn’t want Jack either! So he was doomed to wander the earth, his way lit only by a coal from hell inside a carved out turnip. Superstitious folks carved scary faces on turnips, potatoes, or beets and set them in their windows to ward off Jack and other wandering spirits. The colonists must have concluded that pumpkins made much more intimidating faces! Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow contributed to the pumpkin’s spooky reputation with the following: “. . .the tracks of horses’ hoofs deeply dented in the road, and evidently at furious speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a broad part of the brook, where the water ran deep and black, was found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin.”
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