Squash played an important dual role: the inside was served as preservable food eaten throughout winter, and the outside was used for containers and utensils.Ĭolonists from Europe adopted squash into their diets to help survive the harsh New England winters.
That makes them one of the oldest known crops. Squash is thought to have been first cultivated around 10,000 years ago in what is modern-day Mexico. The word originally comes from the Indigenous Narragansett word askútasquash, which literally means “green vegetable eaten green.” The word squash is first recorded in English around 1640. Summer squash plants reach maturity in 45 to 60 days, while winter squash typically take 80 to 100 days. There are summer squash that have soft skins and are harvested in warmer months (think zucchini and yellow squash), and then there are winter squash, which have a hard shell covering a soft edible flesh and seeds (like pumpkins and butternut squash). The word squash is typically applied to those that are eaten (they’re technically fruits, but they’re usually treated as vegetables). What is a squash?Ī squash is defined as “any of various marrow-like cucurbitaceous plants of the genus Cucurbita” that produce fruits that “have a hard rind surrounding edible flesh.” (The plural can be squashes, but the plural form squash is usually used to refer to them collectively.)
Getting the terminology right is the difference between a delicious fall meal and a bitter hard mess of a gourd that should have stayed on the front porch. Both have subspecies of Cucurbita pepo>, for example, which includes the turban gourd (decorative and delicious) and the acorn squash.ĭespite the similarities, the words squash and gourds are often used differently, as anyone who has tried to eat their gourd knows. They’re defined by fruit-bearing, flowering vines that grow adjacent to the ground.Ĭucurbitaceae is a large family with 98 genera and more than 900 species, and there’s a fair amount of overlap between squash and gourds. Squash and gourds (along with pumpkins, which are simply a type of squash) are members of the Cucurbitaceae family of plants. The word gourd is typically used to refer to the decorative varieties of squash that we don’t eat. The word squash is typically used to refer to the kind of fruit with a hard rind surrounding edible flesh, like butternut and acorn squash (which are varieties of winter squash) or zucchini and yellow squash (varieties of summer squash).
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