The Gastrographer
Mapping Culinary History
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Journey Point Map Key
Pumpkin & Squash
Cucurbita spp.
🌍Origin
The Americas — c. 8000 BCE
🌱Domestication
The pumpkin and squash family (Cucurbita spp.) represents one of the earliest and most consequential plant domestications in the whole of human history, and one of the most remarkable, for it was accomplished not once but repeatedly, in different lands and from different wild ancestors. The story begins in the highland valleys of Mexico at least ten thousand years ago. Archaeological deposits from the Guilá Naquitz cave in the Oaxaca valley, excavated by Kent Flannery, yielded squash rind fragments dated to approximately 8000 BCE, establishing the Oaxacan highlands as the probable cradle of Cucurbita pepo, the species that would in time give rise to the field pumpkin, the summer squash, the acorn squash, the ornamental gourd, and, much later and in Italy, the courgette. The earliest growers did not cultivate these plants chiefly for their flesh, which in the wild forms was thin and bitter, but for their seeds, which are rich in oil and protein and could be dried and stored almost indefinitely against the lean season, and for the hard, durable rinds, which served as bowls, bottles, scoops, and rattles. The genus was domesticated at least three, and perhaps four, separate times. Wholly independently of the work unfolding in highland Mexico, the peoples of the Andean foothills of Bolivia, Peru, and northern Argentina took into cultivation a different wild ancestor and produced Cucurbita maxima, the species behind the butternut and Hubbard squashes, the Japanese kabocha, and the great South American zapallo, a denser, sweeter, starchier fruit than its Mexican cousin. A third species, Cucurbita argyrosperma, the cushaw or silver-seed gourd, was domesticated separately again in Mexico, and a fourth, Cucurbita moschata, the species of the true butternut and the canonical North American pie pumpkin, has its own distinct lowland tropical origin. This record of repeated, independent domestication, from different wild populations across thousands of kilometres and thousands of years, is matched by almost no other crop on earth, and it accounts for the bewildering diversity of a family whose members range from a tender finger-length courgette to a prize pumpkin of half a tonne. What unites them all is a generous, undemanding vigour: the squashes grow fast and crop heavily in almost any warm soil, their seeds travel and replant with ease, and their flesh, seeds, flowers, and shoots are all edible, which is precisely why human beings on two continents, and then on all of them, took the plant so readily to heart.
⛵Global Voyage
From their Oaxacan origins the cultivars of Cucurbita pepo spread slowly northward through Mesoamerica and into the eastern woodlands of North America, carried across many generations as the third member of the Three Sisters, the companion planting of maize, beans, and squash in which the broad squash leaves shaded the soil and held its moisture. By approximately 1000 CE squash was grown from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes basin and formed a structural part of the food systems of dozens of indigenous nations, whilst far to the south the Andean Cucurbita maxima had become a staple of the highland civilisations that culminated in the Inca. For ten thousand years the squash was an exclusively American plant, and the world beyond the two American continents knew nothing of it. That changed with the voyages of Columbus. When Spanish ships began returning from the Caribbean in the 1490s, pumpkins and squashes were amongst the very first American plants to reach Europe, and their adoption was extraordinarily swift, far swifter than that of the tomato or the potato, which were long mistrusted. Within a decade squashes were growing in Iberian gardens, and within fifty years of first contact they had spread to Italy, France, the Low Countries, the German lands, and the Ottoman court at Istanbul, slipping easily into kitchens that already understood gourds and melons and welcomed the new vegetable's sweetness and undemanding vigour. The Italian peninsula proved the most creative site of squash development in the whole of Europe: Italian gardeners, by the middle of the sixteenth century, had bred from C. pepo stock the slender, tender, immature summer squash, the courgette or zucchino, a vegetable that had never existed in the Americas, whilst the cooks of Mantua and Venice turned the sweet winter squash into the celebrated stuffed pasta tortelli di zucca. From Europe, and directly from the Iberian colonial empires, the squash continued outward across the world along the trade routes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Portuguese traders carried it to West Africa, where it entered the groundnut stews of the Guinea coast; to India, where it was absorbed into the spiced dry vegetable dishes of Bengal and the north; to China, where it became the nángguā, the 'southern melon'; and to Japan, where, acquired on the way through Southeast Asia, it became the kabocha, its very name a memory of the Cambodian port of its transit. By the eighteenth century Cucurbita species were cultivated on every inhabited continent, and the pumpkin and squash family stood as one of the most thoroughly and rapidly dispersed of all the crops of the Columbian Exchange, an American native that had made itself at home in the cooking of the entire world within a few short generations.
🍽Modern Culinary Role
Few plant families span the global table as completely as Cucurbita, and fewer still offer the cook so many usable parts. In North America the pumpkin defines the very flavour of autumn: roasted, puréed, and spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove for the pie that is the sweet centrepiece of Thanksgiving, and carved hollow into the lantern of Halloween, the festival having carried the old Celtic turnip-lantern tradition onto the far larger and more obliging American squash. In Italy the zucchini is inseparable from summer cooking, shaved raw into carpaccio, battered and fried as fiori di zucca, stuffed with ricotta, or slow-cooked into pasta, whilst the sweet winter squash fills the tortelli di zucca of Mantua. In Japan the dense, sweet kabocha (Cucurbita maxima) is simmered in dashi, soy, and mirin in kabocha no nimono until it has drunk the broth completely, or fried in the lightest of tempura batters. Across the Middle East and North Africa the squash is hollowed and stuffed with spiced lamb and rice in the kousa mahshi of the Levant, candied in syrup with tahini and walnuts in the Turkish kabak tatlısı, and braised into tagines and couscous in the Maghreb. In China, the world's largest producer of pumpkins by far, it is steamed, stewed, simmered into congee, and sweetened with red beans into a winter soup. In India it is dry-cooked with mustard seed and tempered spices into the kaddu and kumro preparations of the north and Bengal, and in West Africa it thickens and sweetens the groundnut soups of the Guinea coast, its leaves and shoots cooked as greens in their own right. The seeds are prized as highly as the flesh: ground into the pepita sauces and mole pastes of Mexico, and, most singularly, pressed in the Styrian valleys of Austria into the dark, viscous, nutty Kürbiskernöl, the roasted pumpkin-seed oil drizzled raw over soups and salads and granted European protected status. Flesh, seeds, flowers, and shoots all entering the kitchen, the squash offers more edible parts than almost any other crop, and it does so on every inhabited continent.