At our local deli today, we bought a hefty, orange and green fruit with glittery wax at the top. This, the owner said, prevented it from rotting (its own stem, obviously, considered to be inadequate). My partner suggested we draw a face on Peter the Pumpkin and put it in the window. I thought of Peter less romantically, as an onion squash destined for the roasting tray and a meeting with pearl barley.
Peter comes from the large and argumentative cucurbit family. Pumpkin and squash originate in the Americas and keep themselves a little aloof from their viney Asian and African cousins – cucumbers, melons and gourds. They come in soft, perishable summer varieties (which includes the bountiful courgette plant) and hard-skinned winter types. Until we became interested in squashes – butternut, acorn, kabocha – the word “pumpkin” represented the whole family of winter squash to Britons. A pumpkin doesn’t have a specific botanical distinction: some think its flesh is sweeter, hence pumpkin pie – and the appallingly oversweet pumpkin spice latte; some attempt a distinction based on size, shape or colour. “Squash”, derived from a Native American word, has a pragmatic air; pumpkin is a diminutive of the French/Latin “pompon”. As a friend remarked, “I eat squash and cosy up with pumpkins.”
Pumpkin pie was almost an inevitability in the late-16th century, when the most acceptable way to Europeanise an unfamiliar plant was to encase it in pastry. Hannah Woolley, probably the first professional female writer in England, offered several recipes for “pompion” pie to her Restoration readers, a growing class with the leisure to be intrigued by new ingredients from the Americas. After this successful debut, the pumpkin languished on the back benches for centuries, an inordinately long time by the standards of Britain’s fast-changing food culture in which ingredients fade and rematerialise every few years. The great domestic cooks of the following centuries – Hannah Glasse, Eliza Acton, Mrs Beeton – largely ignored our dumpy hero. Lady Llanover, the Victorian champion of Welsh culture, celebrated the Gower peninsula for keeping the pumpkin flame alive: “Few vegetables are so little understood, and, consequently so much undervalued in Great Britain, as pumpkins.” (She was right about the lack of understanding; a pumpkin has seeds so is, in fact, a fruit.) In spite of her quiet love and praise for the “nutritive qualities” of the Turk’s Turban and other varieties, the pumpkin settled for a non-culinary role as Cinderella’s coach, Halloween lantern and the star of Yayoi Kusama’s endearing dotty prints.
That flame in the hollow, carved pumpkin helped reignite Old World interest for a second time. The Jack-o’-Lantern, originally taken to the east coast of America by Irish immigrants as a turnip or swede, was quickly swapped for the larger native pumpkin. Thanks to our enthusiasm for Halloween, something like 15 million pumpkins are now grown in the UK, of which around 80 per cent are ditched in early November. American pumpkin pie recipes have never caught on here, surely because, as Niki Segnit remarks, they taste “like a vegetarian lobster bisque set with wallpaper paste”. My recommendation is to turn back the clock on tinned pumpkin purée, condensed milk and “pumpkin spice”, and explore the first European recipes. Hannah Woolley has an eggy version with cinnamon, mace, sugar, eggs and butter. Another is gentrified with raisins, currants and the sherry-like “sack”. When trying recipes for my book I plumped, in the end, for her classically simple “Pompion Pye”, sharpened with apples and seasoned with pepper, which gives a nice tang to the toffee-ish pumpkin custard.
Squash flesh is not homogenous; we are learning to distinguish between those for roasting, mashing or baking, just as we have with that other American import, the potato. The end of October will inevitably smell of candle-scorched pumpkin flesh, perhaps joined by the aromas of roasted squash with sage or cumin – and even the occasional pumpkin pie.
[See also: In Georgia, politics and wine collide again]
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This article appears in the 09 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, 100 days that shook Labour