The Great Pumpkin

By Tracey E. Fern

Peter, Peter eats them. Linus of Peanuts fame keeps
a lookout for The Great One. And Cinderella’s fairy godmother zaps one into a magic coach.

You probably think of pumpkins as the scary squashes of Halloween or the main ingredient in Thanksgiving pies. But pumpkins are more than just symbols of autumn holidays. They are thousands of years old and the stars of folklore, fairy tales, and famous feasts. Here’s the whole scoop, so you won’t be a bumpkin about pumpkins!

No one knows exactly how old pumpkins are, but we do know that prehistoric peoples gobbled them up. Archeologists have dug up ancient pumpkinseeds in Native American cliff dwellings in Colorado and in Peruvian ruins. In fact, pumpkins were probably one of the first foods to be cultivated by natives of North and South America. For centuries, pumpkins and other squashes were one of the three main foods in their diets, along with maize and beans. (The three foods are known as the Native American triad.)

The traditional Native American way to cook a pumpkin was to plop a whole one into the ashes of a fire, bake it until it was tender, scoop out the soft flesh, and dribble it with maple syrup.

Europeans got their first taste of pumpkins soon after arriving in the New World in the early seventeenth century. The colonists called this newfangled food “pumpion” or “pompion.” The plentiful pumpkin kept the hungry settlers from starving, and they soon learned many ways to cook it. The colonists feasted on pumpkin beer, pumpkin stew, and mashed pumpkin. They even ate the pumpkin flowers. In fact, the colonists ate so much of this squash, they sang this little tune: “We have pumpkin at morning and pumpkin at noon. If it were not for pumpkin, we should be undoon.”

Sometime in the late seventeenth century, the colonists began a Thanksgiving tradition by combining cooked pumpkin with milk, eggs, and molasses to make pies. In 1705, Connecticut colonists in Colchester actually postponed Thanksgiving until they could get their hands on enough molasses to whip up a batch of pies.

Pumpkin pie became so popular that it was included in the first cookbook published by an American. Amelia Simmons printed the recipe in her book, American Cookery, in 1796. Her pie included one quart of pumpkin, three pints of cream, nine beaten eggs, and lots of sugar and spices.

The pumpkin was not just a life-saving food for the colonists. It had lots of other uses. Pumpkinseeds were steeped in hot water to brew a dark tea. This powerful potion was used as a medicine to treat tapeworm and other diseases.

According to an eighteenth-century book on the history of Connecticut, dried pumpkin shells gave the colonists a head start on haircuts. A pumpkin shell was placed on top of a colonist’s shaggy noggin and used as a cutting guide. People with these hairstyles were called “pumpkin-heads.”

In the nineteenth century, “some punkins” meant “really special” in slang.

Pumpkins were popular with Native Americans and the early settlers partly because they were easy to grow. To flourish, pumpkins need only lots of sun, water, and space.

Most people think of pumpkins as vegetables, but they are actually fruits. Pumpkins belong to the gourd family and are close cousins of melons and cucumbers.

Pumpkins come in hundreds of varieties to suit different needs and growing conditions. “Baby Boos” are ghostly white. “Jack Be Little,” “Baby Bear,” and “Spookie” are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. An “Atlantic Giant” can tip the scales at more than one thousand pounds and needs a crane to hoist it out of the pumpkin patch. These huge pumpkins don’t look anything like the smooth round fruits that you see at the market. They are lumpy, misshapen, covered with warts, and have rinds that are a foot thick.

More than sixty thousand acres of pumpkins are harvested every year in the United States. Some communities grow so many pumpkins that they hold festivals in their honor. One Delaware town hosts the World Championship Punkin’ Chunkin’ Contest every autumn. The object of the contest is to see who can hurl a pumpkin the farthest. Contestants build contraptions such as catapults, slingshots, and cannons to launch pumpkins over a half mile.

In Ohio, more than one hundred thousand people come to watch the Pumpkin Roll. The contest is to see who can push a pumpkin across the finish line first using only a stick. And an organization called the World Pumpkin Confederation sponsors contests all over the world to see who can grow the biggest pumpkins.

Scientists are coming up with even more uses for the pumpkin. One scientist is breeding a pumpkin that has hundreds of peanut-sized seeds inside. When heated, these seeds puff up like popcorn.

One way or another, the pumpkin has been indispensable for centuries. Maybe that’s why it is celebrated in so many stories and festivals. This year while you carve your jack-o’-lantern or fill up on pumpkin pie, remember to pay your respects to the all-purpose pumpkin.