By Joel Denker

The French explorer Samuel de Champlain marveled at the natives in what is now southern Maine growing squash the size of a fist, pumpkins, beans, and corn. He and his companions were impressed by the ingenuity of the Indian farmers.

Squash, beans, and corn were the “three sisters,” the foundation stones of indigenous agriculture. Squash and their kindred pumpkins were oddities to the Europeans, who met them for the first time in the seventeenth century. These vegetables, members of the same species, belonged to the vast cucurbit or gourd family. The cucurbits included a wide range of vine-growing plants: cucumbers, melons, summer and winter squash, ornamental gourds, pumpkins.

The English called the New World oddities “pompions,” from the French word for melons “cooked by the sun.” Since they had never seen them before, they reached for a familiar word. In the 1800s, Americans started using the word “pumpkin.”

The squashes and pumpkins are among the most ancient of plants, cultivated by Indians in Mexico and in the Eastern United States before both corn and beans. Archaeologists have dug up squash seeds in Mexico that date back more than 10 thousand years. The earliest of these plants, scholars surmise, were hard-shelled gourds. If they had any flesh at all, it was probably extremely bitter. The gourds were likely used to make containers, bowls, cups, and the like.

The plants were probably first domesticated for their attractive seeds. Squash and pumpkin seeds, rich in oil and high in protein, were savored.

In time, it is thought, mutant squashes emerged that were larger, fleshier and less fibrous, and tastier than their predecessors. The Indians then concentrated on cultivating these varieties. Although the seeds were still prized, it was the starchy sweet meat of the vegetable that was now most coveted.

In the Indian communities of Mexico and the American Southwest, no part of the squash or pumpkin was wasted. The versatile plant fed the natives through the year. Blossoms picked at dawn in the spring were eaten in soups and stews. Leaves served as a handy cooking wrapper. In the winter, pumpkins that had been dried could be baked or boiled.

The squash seed, which the Indians gave the Spanish soldiers as a peace offering, was variously used. Maya tribes in Mexico prepared a relish of ground squash seeds and chilis, anthropologist Sophie Coe points out. They also made a drink that blended ground beans and squash.

Luxurious dishes cooked for the Aztec royalty were enriched with sauces flavored and thickened with ground squash seeds. A “casserole of fowl,” the sixteenth century Spanish priest Bernardino de Sahagun wrote, was served to the “Lords.” It was made with a festive sauce of red chilis, tomatoes, and squash seeds. Pumpkin seeds are a key element in many of the nutty mole sauces served today in Mexican restaurants. Pepian, a pumpkin-based sauce, is like a Mexican pesto, food writer Elisabeth Rozin suggests.

In Northeastern America, especially in New England, the colonists also absorbed pumpkin wisdom from the Indians. Pumpkins and squashes were essential to the aboriginal diet. They ate squash in the summer, writer William Wood observes, “when their corne is spent.”

Innovative tribal cooks exploited the pumpkin. They baked the gourd in the hot ashes of their fires. After baking, they split the pumpkin open and dressed it with honey, maple syrup, or bear fat. A thick pumpkin soup was another favorite. It was “boiled with meat to the consistency of potato soup,” a seventeenth century Oneida Indian record stated. Pumpkin pancakes, porridge, and jerky were also part of the aboriginal repertoire.

Inspired by Indian techniques, New Englanders made their own pumpkin stews and baked pumpkin dishes. These casseroles became “standing dishes” on the Yankee table. Puddings and custards, familiar English sweets, were transformed by the addition of New World pumpkin.

The classic American pumpkin pie developed from early creations. One treat was a hollowed-out pumpkin whose top was cut off. It was then filled with milk or cream, spiced with ginger, nutmeg, and other seasonings, and frequently filled with sliced apples. Following Indian custom, the shell was then baked over hot coals.

In the country’s first cookbook, published in 1796, Amelia Simmons refashioned the dessert into a pastry more like today’s pumpkin pie. Her instructions called for “one quart of milk, one pint pompkin, four eggs, molasses, allspice and ginger, in a crust, bake one hour.”

The colonists had appropriated the Indian pumpkin to make their own brand of cooking. An 1831 cookbook equated a passion for pumpkin with the New England character. Pumpkin pie, it said, symbolized the “universal Yankee nation.”

The colonists’ affection for the early vegetables offended the English sensibility. ”Instead of Apples and Peares, they had Pumpkins and Squashes of different kinds,” the sixteenth century writer Edward Johnson wrote disparagingly. Cultivated Britishers scorned indigenous food as well as the untidy farming methods, like planting seeds in mounds or hills, used to produce it.

Americans invested the pumpkin with powerful associations. The prolific fruit of the autumn harvest represented the wonders of a new land’s abundance. As the country industrialized, the pumpkin became an emblem of a pristine rural past.

For the New England poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, the Thanksgiving pumpkin summoned up a time of domestic bliss. “On Thanksgiving day . . ./When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more/And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiles before/What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye?/What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?”

It is not primarily as food, but as nostalgic symbol that pumpkin exerts its hold on us today. Most of our pumpkins are grown not for eating but for carving. When was the last time you yearned for a bowl of chunky pumpkin soup?

 

Originally published in The InTowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/