by Rebecca Rupp
Starch is a complex carbohydrate, consisting of long chains of linked sugar molecules, which may be branched and bushy, forming amylopectin, or long and linear, making amylose. Potatoes contain both, usually in a ratio of about 4:1. In a potato-eating dietary sense, both are good: diets high in complex carbohydrates reduce the risks of heart disease and colon cancer. For industrial purposes, the preferred starch by far is amylopectin — and to reduce the prohibitive cost of separating desirable amylopectin from not-so-desirable amylose, the German Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology came up with the all-amylopectin Amflora potato.
Potato starch is big business. Today it’s a major component of paper, construction materials, adhesives, packing chips, emulsifiers for soups and gravies, and biodegradable plastics, which in turn are used for everything from picnic forks to golf tees. Potato starch was used as the adhesive on the backs of the first lickable postage stamps — the famous “penny black,” bearing the profile of 15-year-old Princess (not yet Queen) Victoria, was pasted onto postcards with potatoes — and Autochrome, a photography process devised by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1903, used potato-starch-coated glass plates to produce early color photographs.
Marilyn Monroe once posed in a potato sack, looking delectable and doubtless giving new meaning to the term hot potato, which since the 1920s has meant a spectacular girl. For those lucky enough to have one, the National Potato Promotion Board, based in Denver, Colorado, has decreed that February is National Potato Lover’s Month, nicely timed to overlap with Valentine’s Day.
If you’d really like to make points, there’s a potato cultivar called Diamond, and another called Red Rose.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In Which
PUMPKINS ATTEND
THE WORLD’S FAIR
plus
Unexpected Explosions,
Renaissance Water Wings,
Captain Smith’s Disappointment,
A Remedy for Freckles,
Montezuma’s Hors d’Oeuvres,
and A Bargain with the Devil
I’d like to coin a new term: Cucurbitacean (kyoo-kur-bit-a-se-en) n. A person who regards pumpkins and squashes with deep, often rapturous love.
AMY GOLDMAN
In 1699, Paul Dudley, Massachusetts judge and long-distance member of the British Royal Society, came upon a stray pumpkin vine in his pasture. Left to itself, he noted in a letter to the Society’s Philosophical Transactions, the pumpkin grew until it “ran along over several fences and spread over a large piece of ground far and wide,” generating in the process 260 pumpkins, not counting the small ones, or the unripe.
It’s not recorded what Mr. Dudley did with his serendipitous pumpkins, but he doubtless put them to good use, since colonial New Englanders are said to have used more pumpkins in more ways than anyone else before or since. Boston, before it was Beantown, was Pumpkinshire, and New England VIPs, by the mid-nineteenth century, were boastfully known as big pumpkins. It just goes to show what a pumpkin can do.
The prolific Dudley pumpkin and offspring were cucurbits, members of the large and nightmarishly complex Cucurbitaceae family. Prominent pumpkin relatives include squash, cucumbers, melons, and gourds, plus a few off-the-wall distant cousins, such as Benincasa hispida, the wax gourd, the waxy cuticle of which can be scraped off and used to make candles, and Luffa cylindrica, from whose dried fruits trendy bathers acquire their luffa (or loofah) sponges. Pumpkins and squashes, so closely interconnected that many promiscuously interbreed to form misshapen but usually edible “squumpkins,” have bewildered botanists for centuries.
Common garden classification, which inconveniently bears little resemblance to accepted botanical order, divides the multitudinous squashes into summer and winter varieties. Summer squashes ripen in summer, have delicate edible shells and seeds, and should be eaten hot off the vine, since they have generally poor keeping qualities. Examples are the yellow crook-neck, the bush scallop or pattypan, and the ubiquitous zucchini. Winter squashes ripen in the fall, have tough inedible shells and large hard seeds, and store well for periods of several months. Examples are the acorn, butternut, and Hubbard squashes, the spaghetti squash, and the orange-topknotted turban squash.
Pumpkins, botanically lumped with the summer squashes, behave persistently like winter squashes, and many early naturalists and travelers seem to have used the name “pumpkin” simply to indicate any fruit inordinately big and round. As late as 1885, French seed house Vilmorin-Andrieux listed a long string of vegetable behemoths in The Vegetable Garden under the heading “Pumpkins,” stating: “Under this name, which does not correspond to any botanical division, are grouped a certain number of varieties of Cucurbita maxima, which are remarkable for the great size of their fruit.” Included are the mammoth pumpkin; the huge Hubbard squash; the Valparaiso squash, shaped like an immense lemon; the chestnut squash, round and brick red; and the turban gourd.
More discriminating taxonomists these days sort the edible squashes into four basic species. Cucurbita pepo, noted for pentagonal stems with prickly spines, encompasses all the summer squashes, field pumpkins, acorn squashes, spaghetti squashes, and miscellaneous gourds. C. maxima (round stems) includes the banana, buttercup, Hubbard, mammoth, and turban squashes, and the giant pumpkins, now so popular in pumpkin-growing contests. C. moschata (pentagonal smooth stems) includes the butternut squash and the golden cushaw; and C. mixta (now often argyrosperma), the white and green cushaws and the Tennessee Sweet Potato squash.
Amid all this variety — squashes come in an immense array of shapes (many bizarre) and in colors ranging from tan, cream and orange to blue, black and salmon pink — pumpkins distinguish themselves in the matter of sheer size. Joshua Hempstead, an eighteenth-century Connecticut colonist, noted in his diary for 1721: “Wednesd. 20th: saw a pumpkin 5 foot 11 inches Round.” Like Joshua, few of us can resist the unusually enormous — or, apparently, keep ourselves from getting into fights over the precise enormity of it, which is why Sir Hugh Beaver in 1955 instituted the Guinness Book of World Records. He hoped by providing incontrovertible data to eliminate brawling in pubs.
Surprisingly, Thomas Jefferson, a man obsessed with size, seems never to have measured a pumpkin. Jefferson in the 1780s was engaged in the scientific equivalent of a pub brawl with Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, over — continentally speaking — whose was bigger than whose. Buffon, in his Natural History, published in forty-four volumes between 1749 and 1809, insisted that America was degenerate, its native inhabitants, animals, and plants all smaller, weaker, and generally punier than their European counterparts. Incensed, Jefferson countered with black bears, beavers, elk, and moose, all far larger than the next-best European equivalents, and dispatched Lewis and Clark on their cross-country expedition with instructions to find something huge to end the argument — ideally, a living mammoth.
The pumpkin, however — even though Jefferson planted eight acres of them on each of his plantations for feeding his livestock — seems never to have crossed his mind as a counter in the size debate. Perhaps the Jeffersonian pumpkins were just too small.
The modern obsession with giant pumpkins has its roots in the competitive state agricultural fairs of the nineteenth century, where farmers and gardeners vied to win prizes for the biggest and the best. The giant pumpkin that first won America’s fancy, according to Amy Goldman and Victor Schrager, authors of The Compleat Squash (2004), was an import from France, a variety of C. maxima known as the Jaune Gros de Paris or Large Yellow Paris. Among the first to grow these in the United States was Henry David Thoreau who, having obtained seeds from the U.S. Patent Office, managed to produce a 123½-pounder, with which he won a prize at the Middlesex Fair. He subsequently sold his “squash” to a buyer who planned to make a profit by selling the seeds for ten cents apiece.
Soon renamed the Mammoth, the Jaune Gros rapidly became ubiquitous in American gardens. In 1875 the delighted Mr. James Rister of Bethany, Missouri, wrote
to seedsman J. J. H. Gregory, from whom he had purchased seeds of the “Mammoth French Squash”: “I must brag a little, for I believe from the seed I had of you I raised the largest Squash in the world; it weighed over 300 pounds!”
In 1900, William Warnock, a carriage maker and hobby gardener from Goderich, Ontario, topped all previous records with a 400-pounder, a pumpkin so remarkable that it and Warnock were invited to the Paris World’s Fair. Four years later, Warnock surpassed himself with a 403-pound pumpkin, exhibited in the Palace of Agriculture at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. (That same fair gave us the ice-cream cone, a re-enactment of the Boer War that included a horseman leaping from a height of 35 feet into a pool of water, and a lecture by fruit specialist J. T. Stinson in which attendees were first introduced to the maxim “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”) Warnock’s 403-pound record was to stand for the next seventy-five years.
Mammoth cultivars proliferated in the interim, among them the Hundred Weight, the Mammoth Fifty Dollar, and Landreth’s Yellow Monster. None, despite their hefty names, managed to outweigh Warnock’s prize — until Howard Dill (thereafter nicknamed “Moby Dill”) of Windsor, Nova Scotia, through a process of crossbreeding and selection, created the blimp-like Dill’s Atlantic Giant. In 1980, an Atlantic Giant hit a record-breading 459 pounds; in 1981, one reached 493½.
Giant pumpkins today have passed the 500-, 1000-, and 1,500-pound marks, with apparently no end in sight. (The world champion as of 2010 weighed in at 1,810½ pounds — approximately the weight of a Volkswagen Beetle.) According to horticulturists, the phenomenal size of recent cultivars results from a combination of genetic change and improved culture techniques. Size in pumpkins is ultimately determined at the cellular level. Large-fruited varieties have longer periods of cell division and thus more cells than smaller varieties; and those cells continue to expand in size after cell division comes to a halt. Between these two phenomena, C. maxima can pack on fifty pounds a day.
* * *
Great Pumpkins
The pumpkin is an American icon. It has been immortalized in prose and poetry by such literary greats as Mother Goose, Washington Irving, John Greenleaf Whittier, and L. Frank Baum, and few autumns pass without somebody quoting James Whitcomb Riley’s colloquial tribute to the time “when the frost is on the punkin.” Henry David Thoreau tossed it a left-handed compliment, reflecting on the solitary banks of Walden Pond that he would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to himself than on a velvet cushion and be crowded; and in 1697, master storyteller Charles Perrault provided his Cinderella with the best of both, transforming a solitary pumpkin into a velvet-cushioned coach to carry her in cucurbital elegance to the prince’s ball.
Since 1959 we’ve been able to sympathize each Halloween with Charles Schultz’s character Linus, patiently waiting for the Great Pumpkin to rise out of the pumpkin patch and fly through the air, delivering toys to all the good children in the world.
Best of all the pumpkin tales, however, may be one of Aesop’s fables. It tells of a man who lay beneath an oak tree, criticizing the Creator for hanging a tiny acorn on a huge tree, but an enormous pumpkin on a slender vine. Then, the story goes, an acorn fell and hit him on the nose.
* * *
Giant pumpkins aren’t pretty. Most have lost their bright pumpkin orange, due to a heavy influx of squash genes, and none are symmetrically round. The larger a pumpkin gets, the greater its tendency to suffer from a vegetable version of secretarial spread. Crushed by gravity, real behemoths slump, sag, and ooze “like Jabba the Hutt reclining on his divan,” writes Susan Warren in Backyard Giants (2007).
The very earliest cucurbits — probably originating in Central America — were small. They were also bitter, and were most likely valued by early eaters for their protein- and oil-rich seeds. Cultivation of squash and pumpkins dates back at least nine thousand years, judging by scattered remains of seeds and stems found in prehistoric caves in the Tamaulipas mountains of Mexico, and they are thought to have been the first domesticated of the “Indian triad” — squash, beans, and maize — that formed the basis of pre-Columbian Indian diet in both North and South America.
By the arrival of the Europeans, selection had produced squashes sizeable and succulent enough to attract notice. Hernando de Soto, cruising Tampa Bay in 1539, wrote that “beans and pumpkins were in great plenty; both were larger and better than those of Spain; the pumpkins when roasted had nearly the taste of chestnuts.” Coronado saw “melons” (probably squash) on a gold-scouting expedition through the American Southwest, Cartier noted “gros melons” (probably pumpkins) in Canada in 1535, and Samuel de Champlain remarked on the “citroules” (squash?) of New England during his voyage of 1605. Columbus’s account of his first voyage mentions Cuban fields planted with “calebazzas,” or gourds, which were more likely a hard-shelled winter squash.
* * *
Exploding Pumpkins
Pumpkins, though you wouldn’t think so to thump upon them, are amazingly malleable: a growing pumpkin encased in a box will obligingly turn itself into a cube. (Japanese growers have exploited this tendency to grow cuboidal watermelons in boxes, which stack efficiently for shipping.) They’re not, however, infinitely plastic. The giant pumpkin, if it overreaches itself, can literally explode. Too much rain, for example, makes the growing pumpkin swell too fast, exerting pressure on weak spots in the rind, and causing it eventually and abruptly to crack open.
* * *
Botanical consensus is that the gourd grown in ancient and medieval Europe (Lagenaria) is of African origin and reached Asia and the Americas more than 10,000 years ago, most likely by simply floating across the ocean. Ancient Old World mentions of “squash” — those, for example, supposedly grown in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon — probably refer to Lagenaria siceraria, or bottle gourds. Some of these are edible, and it was likely a tasty Lagenaria that the Romans consumed, immature, doused with vinegar and mustard. Roman gardeners also grew gourds for show, in “grotesque forms” up to nine feet long, and Pliny the Elder mentions that gourd vines make a nice shade plant in gardens, when trained over roofs and trellises.
The uses of gourds were legion. Pliny mentions gourds as containers for turpentine, olive oil, honey, wine, and water; and Columella, in his first-century agricultural treatise De Re Rustica, says gourds were used as floats for teaching boys how to swim. Gourds are popularly called “marine pumpkins,” writes Giacomo Castelvetro in The Fruits, Herbs, and Vegetables of Italy (1614), “because they are used by inexperienced swimmers, scared of drowning, who strap a whole dried gourd under their chest to keep from sinking into the sea. Small children learn to swim in the rivers with them.” In his Dictionarium Botanicum, or a Botanical Dictionary for the Use of the Curious in Husbandry and Gardening (1728), Richard Bradley describes the Fishermen’s Gourd used in Italy to catch ducks: apparently these were large-size gourds, big enough to fit helmet-style over a man’s head. They were fashioned with eyeholes; wearers submerged themselves sneakily in the water and grabbed ducks by the legs.
American natives similarly put Lagenaria siceraria to good use. John White, artist, sole surviving Roanoke colonist, and grandfather of Virginia Dare (the first English baby born in the New World), mentions in an account of 1585 that the local Indians used gourds as water buckets and as rattles (which they fastened on a stick and used to “make merri”). Adriaen van der Donck, in his Description of the New Netherlands (1655), describes gourds as “the common water-pail of the natives,” some half a bushel in size. According to John Lawson, early eighteenth-century planters used these same gourds set on poles as purple-martin houses, since the martins, being “very warlike” birds, would scare away the crows.
The American pumpkin and squash admittedly took a bit of getting used to. Some initial disappointments clearly arose from dashed expectations: many newcomers thought that the native cucurbits were a form of melon. Captain John Smith mentions a fruit like a muskmelon grown by the Virginia Indians, only “less
e and worse.” It was almost certainly a squash, and “worse” is an understandable reaction if you bit a squash while hoping for melon. The New England settlers deemed the Narragansett askutasquash “uncivilized to contemplate,” and the squash-and-seafood chowder offered them by hospitable Indian cooks they damned as “the meanest of God’s blessings.”
The New England settlers deemed the Narragansett askutasquash “uncivilized to contemplate.”
Edward Johnson, Massachusetts colonist and militia captain, wrote an early History of New-England in 1654 in which he refers to the new land as a “howling Desart” and points out how clever it was of the Lord “to hide from the Eyes of his people the difficulties they are to encounter . . . that they might not thereby be hindered from taking the worke in hand.” Among these difficulties were wolves and bears, thickets, awful weather, earthquakes, and “Pomkins and Squashes,” which is what the “poore people” had to eat instead of anything nice.
The genial Dutch of New Netherlands, on the other hand, found the local quaasiens “a delightful fruite,” greatly favored by women because it was easy to cook. Traveller John Josselyn praised the squash in his New England’s Rarities Discovered (1672), a volume that includes his “rude and undigested” observations of American topography, culture, and animal and plant life, chronological highlights of New England history, a “Description of an Indian Squa,” and a note on a “pineapple” which, when picked, erupted into a horde of angry wasps. The squash, he says, is “a kind of Melon or rather Gourd for they oftentimes degenerate into gourds; some of these are green, some yellow, some longish like a gourd, others round like an apple; all of them pleasant food boyled and buttered, and seasoned with spice.”