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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781603427418 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Storey Publishing, LLC |
| Publication date: | 01/02/2012 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Gail Damerow has written extensively on raising chickens and other livestock, growing fruits and vegetables, and related rural know-how in more than a dozen books, including What’s Killing My Chickens? and the best-selling Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens, The Chicken Encyclopedia, The Chicken Health Handbook, and Hatching & Brooding Your Own Chicks. Damerow is a contributor to Chickens and Hobby Farms magazines and a regular blogger for Cackle Hatchery. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, where they operate a family farm with poultry and dairy goats, a sizable garden, and a small orchard. Visit her online at gaildamerow.com.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Great American Pumpkin
Pumpkins are an American call to irrationality and excess, a tribute to the bounty of our hemisphere.
— Linden Staciokas Harrowsmith Country Life, 1993
UNKNOWN IN EUROPE BEFORE the time of Columbus, the pumpkin is unique to the Americas. It evolved from a gourdlike vegetable with bitter flesh but edible seeds. Remains of these seeds, dating as far back as 7000 to 5000 B.C., have been found in burial caves among Mexico's Tamaulipas Mountains. Pieces of stems, seeds, and shell have also been discovered in the ruins of ancient cliff dwellers of the southwestern United States.
The Native North Americans introduced early European settlers to the pumpkin. When half the Pilgrims died during their first arduous winter in the New World, the Patuxet Squanto showed the survivors how to reap an abundance of food by planting prolific pumpkin vines among corn, using herring as fertilizer.
In October 1621 the Pilgrims had cause for their first big celebration, and the pumpkin was featured as part of the feast. It was probably boiled, although before long the settlers learned to make a simple pumpkin "pie" by removing the top, scooping out seeds and fibers, filling the cavity with milk, and roasting the pumpkin whole until the milk was absorbed.
The year 1622 offered no occasion for renewed celebration — the harvest was poor and the supply ships brought few provisions. To avert starvation, Governor William Bradford ordered the Pilgrims to grow more pumpkins.
Apparently, the plan worked: In 1623 the settlers held their second celebration. That off-again, on-again event eventually evolved into Thanksgiving Day, which today wouldn't be complete without pumpkin pie.
Pumpkins keep well in storage to provide sustenance throughout winter, adding to their importance as an early staple. They were such a common food during America's infancy that the Port of Boston was known as Pumpkinshire, and a Plymouth Colony poet wrote:
If fresh meat be wanting to fill up our dish We have carrots and pumpkins and turnips and fish;
Pioneers traveling westward carried along their pumpkin seeds, a practice attested to by the once common phrase, "As fat as a prairie pumpkin." Settlers became so fond of pumpkins that when they migrated to a place where their traditional pumpkins wouldn't grow, they adapted the nearest native squash and called it a pumpkin.
In tough times, pumpkin meat could be made into a substitute for such hard-to-get staples as flour, molasses, and sugar. The pumpkin was so ubiquitous at the family table that a circuit-riding preacher once prayed, "Dear Lord, give me just one good meal without pumpkin."
Englishman John Josselyn apparently didn't share this antipumpkin sentiment. In the late 1600s he visited New World farms and gardens, and in 1672 wrote in New-England's Rarities Discovered that pumpkins were a "pleasant food, boiled and buttered and seasoned with Spice."
Through selective breeding over the years, the stringy, watery, bland fruits of earlier times evolved into pumpkins with sweet, thick, smooth-textured meat. Pumpkins remained an important staple until after World War II, when refrigeration supplanted root cellars as a way to preserve out-of-season foods. Instead of a necessity of life, the pumpkin then became a symbol of bounty — something to be displayed on the front porch or carved for the amusement of children.
As families moved away from the country into suburban homes, many found their backyards too small to accommodate sprawling pumpkin vines. Those who continued enjoying pumpkins were less likely to grow their own than to buy them seasonally at grocery stores and roadside stands.
The pumpkins they bought, grown in fields measured by the acre, were not developed for their superior culinary properties, but instead for superior marketing qualities: hard shells and tough stems, flat roll-resistant bottoms, facelike symmetry, and a size that offered plenty of room for creative carving. As pumpkin carving has evolved into an art form, pumpkin growing has developed into an entertainment industry, complete with on-farm hayrides through the fields to seek out the season's perfect specimen.
Perfection, in this case, involves not only symmetry but also size. Intrigued by the possibilities, growers of giant pumpkins now engage in friendly but intense international competition. Rather than planting pumpkins by the field, competitive growers put in only one, or perhaps a few, pampered plants.
The flavor of pumpkins grown for size and/or for carving is secondary to their structural strength, and these "entertainment pumpkins" require a lot of space, so pumpkin growing hasn't been a top priority for gourmet cooks and kitchen gardeners. Indeed, many cooks and gardeners are totally unfamiliar with the sweet pumpkin, which is truly a connoisseur's delight.
But a combination of factors is changing all that: the evolution of gardening into a recreational pastime and the discovery that pumpkins can easily be grown, even by those who weren't born with a silver hoe in their hands; the development of compact varieties that take up less garden space; the desire to return to healthful home food production; and a burgeoning awareness of the importance of heirloom seeds, leading to a renewed appreciation of cultivars that are more suitable for culinary purposes than for carving. For all these reasons, pumpkins are more popular today than ever before, with new varieties introduced each year.
CHAPTER 2
Fruit of Many Faces
Where the squash ends and the pumpkin begins is not only hard to determine, but a matter of fierce difference of opinion between squash/pumpkin fanciers ... Even botanists have trouble identifying some specimens.
— Terry Pimsleur The New Pumpkin Book, 1981
IT NEVER FAILS TO AMAZE ME that so many otherwise informed cooks or gardeners haven't a clue that a pumpkin suitable for carving doesn't necessarily make good eating, and vice versa. If I want to carve, I select a nicely shaped jack-o'lantern pumpkin. If I want to cook, I select a sweet, meaty pie pumpkin. The two are worlds apart.
What Is a Pumpkin?
Life was simpler back when I was growing up. In those days we knew of only two kinds of pumpkin — the smallish kind with sweet, firm flesh that makes delicious pies, and the somewhat larger pumpkin, good only for carving into jack-o'-lanterns because of its hard shell and stringy, watery meat. Today pumpkins come in a broader assortment, ranging from apple-sized miniatures, through globes of innumerable sizes, shapes, colors, and uses, and on up to gigantic record breakers that, to be moved, require a good half-dozen stout men. How can they all be pumpkins?
Determining what is, or is not, a pumpkin is a constant and hotly contested debate among pumpkin devotees. Some consider a pumpkin to be any fruit that's round and orange and a member of the squash family. Others insist that to qualify as a pumpkin, it must also have meaty flesh that's fine textured and flavorful enough to make outstanding pies.
Earlier in this century, a bunch of botanists thought they had settled the debate by defining a pumpkin as any fruit of the genus Cucurbita with a hard, ridged stem — in contrast to a squash, which (by their definition) has a soft, round stem. But that definition turned out to include several squash varieties that no one would consider calling pumpkins, so it was back to the drawing board.
Competitive vegetable growers stir the murky waters with their oversized, orange-shelled, meaty squashes, which they call giant pumpkins. To a competitive grower, if it's orange it's a pumpkin; if it's green it's a squash. But that leaves out the 'White Jack-O-Lantern', the 'Green Striped Cushaw', the 'Queensland Blue', and the tan-shelled 'Cheese' pumpkin.
A Squash or a Berry?
So what is a pumpkin? No one disputes the fact that a pumpkin is not actually a vegetable but a fruit, and a berry at that. Like other berries, the pumpkin is a simple fruit that develops from a single pistil of the flower and has no stone (like a peach's) or papery core (like an apple's). Unlike other berries, however, the pumpkin has a hard outer shell.
Nor does anyone dispute the fact that pumpkins belong to the family Cucurbitaceae, consisting of 90 genera and 700 species of tender, heat-loving plants with tendril-bearing vines and alternate leaves. This family includes all cucumbers, melons, squash, and gourds. And everyone agrees that the pumpkin's genus is Cucurbita, which includes all varieties of pumpkin, gourd, and winter and summer squash. The controversy starts, however, when you get down to species. Of the six Cucurbita species, so-called pumpkins fall under four: C. pepo, C. argyrosperma (formerly C. mixta), C. moschata, and C. maxima.
In attempting to describe the relationships among these four species, Glenn Drowns of Calamus, Iowa, explains that "the big orange thing" everyone readily recognizes as a traditional pumpkin is a pepo. Pepos prefer northern climates that are frost-free from late April through early October, but lack early-summer heat. A pumpkin of the pepo species has a hard, woody, ridged stem, and most have orange shells. Nonpumpkin pepos include acorn squash, spaghetti squash, summer squash, and hard-shelled gourds.
Glenn — who has been growing pumpkins since he was three years old and might well be the nation's leading authority on the subject — points out that as early settlers moved westward and brought along their pumpkin seeds, they sometimes found that C. pepo wouldn't grow well in the new area. They looked for something similar that would grow, and they called that a pumpkin.
In the South, the closest thing to a pepo that can withstand the insects running rampant in hot, humid weather is C. moschata, a species that includes one of the oldest cultivated pumpkins in the Americas, the 'Cheese' pumpkin. The 'Cheese' — so called because it's round and flat, like a wheel of cheese — is closely related to the butternut squash. The parent of the butternut is the 'Golden Cushaw' pumpkin, which, like the 'Cheese', has a tan shell and solid, sweet, orange meat.
In the hot, dry air of the Southwest, where nights stay warm, the 'Green Striped Cushaw' (C. argyrosperma) does well, so it's a "pumpkin" to southwesterners, even though it's by no means orange and its flesh tends to be thin and bland compared to that of other pumpkins.
The nearest thing to a pumpkin that tolerates the cool, wet weather of the North is C. maxima. The characteristics of this pumpkin — closely related to the banana and the hubbard squash — include a soft, spongy stem without ridges. All giant pumpkins are maximas, but not all maximas are huge. And not all maximas are orange. 'Lumina', the "painting pumpkin," is pearly white, and the drum-shaped 'Queensland' pumpkin is blue. It's called a pumpkin, however, because in Australia the word pumpkin means "squash." Some would insist that all maximas, regardless of their color, are squashes, simply because they aren't pepos.
Today's botanists argue that only a C. pepo is a "true" pumpkin and that all other species are technically varieties of winter squash. The rest of us have no trouble identifying members of all four Cucurbita species as pumpkins. As far as we're concerned, if it looks like a pumpkin or tastes like a pumpkin, it is a pumpkin.
Ornamental Miniatures
The miniature pumpkin was developed by Colorado's Hollar Seeds, but very nearly never saw the light of day, because neighbors kept sneaking over to "liberate" the cute little pumpkins from their vines in the growing fields. In desperation, the grower moved his test site to a location he kept secret from everyone, including Hollar executives.
Introduced as the 'Sweetie Pie' by Stokes Seeds, the mini is now sold under other names, including 'Munchkin' and its most common and graphic designation, 'Jack-Be-Little'. Measuring 3 inches (7 cm) across and weighing only a few ounces, this mini is a sellout success at farmstands and florist's shops because it's just the right size for holiday centerpieces. Some people believe minis are too small to be worth eating, but I find them tasty and attractive when baked and served, one per person, in their own jackets.
Despite the fruit's small size, the vines range widely, even stretching up into low-growing trees. One year I planted some in my orchard and ended up with little orange pumpkins hanging from the lower limbs of a dwarf apple tree. As you might guess, these vines are ideal for growing on trellises.
Since the original miniature came out, a spate of others has followed, including the ghost white 'Baby Boo'; the compact, vining 'Jack-B-Quick' (suitable for growing in confined spaces); and the larger, rounder 'Little Lantern', sometimes called 'Baby Pam'. All miniatures are pepos.
Culinary Pumpkins
A good cooking pumpkin is not only sweet and firm fleshed, but also a good keeper. If you're looking for a pumpkin to grow strictly for culinary purposes, consider one of the heirloom varieties. You won't go far wrong with a 'Small Sugar' or 'Winter Luxury' (both pepos), a 'Cheese' pumpkin or 'Golden Cushaw' (both moschata), or a 'Rouge Vif d'Etampes' (a maxima). Most newer varieties fall short of these in both flavor and texture.
For northerners, the pie pumpkin is the 'Small Sugar', a variety that goes by many names, including 'New England Pie', 'Northern Pie', and 'Sugar Pie'. Sugar pumpkins weigh in the 5- to 8-pound (2.3–3.6 kg) range and are famous for their sweet, solid, fine-grained flesh.
In my southern garden the small 'Sugar' pumpkin ripens too early for winter storage, but I grow it anyway because the vines are prolific and I like the flavor of the flesh, which also remains firm in pickles and preserves. Glenn Drowns, on the other hand, swears by the 'Winter Luxury'.
The 'Cheese' pumpkin and the 'Golden Cushaw' (sometimes called the Neck pumpkin after its long, curved, flesh-filled neck) are both good choices for growing in hot, humid climates. Moschatas, in general, have the sweetest meat of all the pumpkins. Commercially, more pies are made from moschatas than from pepos.
The 'Rouge Vif d'Étampes' was popular in French markets in the 1800s and has since come back home to North America. Its shape is somewhat similar to that of the 'Cheese' pumpkin, but its shell is ruddier in color. It, too, goes by several different names, including the 'Cinderella' (because it was the original model for Cinderella's coach) and the 'Deep Red' (after the color of its shell).
This is by no means an exhaustive list of culinary pumpkins. Others are available regionally, developed to grow well under local conditions. Still others are generated by seed companies as "improved" varieties. Do your homework when selecting a variety for your kitchen garden. Some great-sounding pumpkins (the 'Spookie', for example) are actually intermediate between culinary types and carving types, and are truly outstanding for neither.
Jack-o'-Lanterns
Carving-type pumpkins are grown less for their flavor than for their attractive appearance and the sturdiness of their stems. As a result, their flesh tends to be bland and watery. Their culinary properties don't matter much, though, since once a pumpkin has been carved, its meat is ruined for eating.
Any pumpkin can be carved, provided it has enough structural strength to withstand holes cut into its shell. A flat bottom is also an asset, so your displayed creation won't roll. Although you should never carry a pumpkin by its stem (lest the stem break off and the fruit subsequently rot), a good jack-o'-lantern has a strong stem that makes a sturdy lid handle.
Carving pumpkins are generally large, to allow plenty of space for design development, and are roundish rather than flattened — although some carvers prefer elongated pumpkins taller than they are wide. A symmetrical shape is preferred by some, while others enjoy the challenge offered by irregular proportions.
Since 1871 the standard carving pumpkin has been the heirloom pepo 'Connecticut Field', a variety that ranges in size from 15 to 30 pounds (6.8–13.6 kg) and is not always uniform in shape. The 'Howden Field', developed by Jack A. Howden as an improvement upon the 'Connecticut Field', is more uniform in size and shape, and is more symmetrical. It also has thicker flesh and is therefore less likely to grow lopsided.
A number of other variations on the 'Connecticut Field' and 'Howden' have been developed, many of them bearing Halloweenish names such as the 'Ghost Rider' and 'Jack-O-Lantern'. Some varieties, developed to be planted in backyard gardens, grow on compact vines that take up less space than the widely spreading vines of commercial field pumpkins.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Perfect Pumpkin"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Gail Damerow.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introducing the Versatile Pumpkin1. The Great American Pumpkin
2. Fruit of Many Faces
3. The Pumpkin Patch
4. The Big One
5. Pumpkin Pests
6. Pumpkin Arts and Crafts
7. Pumpkin Eater
Appendix
Recommended Reading
Organizations
Carving Supplies
Carving Contests
Pumpkin Seed Sources
Converting Recipe Measurements to Metric
IndeX
What People are Saying About This
"...I believe this could be the best book ever published on pumpkins."
—Howard Dill, breeder of 'Dill's Atlantic Giant' pumpkins, Windsor, Nova Scotia