Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon

1. Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash: 10,000 BCE to 1600

9 i one j Corn,Beans,and JustAnotherSquash 10,000 bce to 1600 I t was most likely cold that day in November 1621 when En­ glish colonists and resident Indians gathered to celebrate the newcomers ’ first successful harvest in Plymouth, Massachusetts, at a fête that Americans now commemorate as the first Thanksgiving. According to Edward Winslow, one of two participants to leave a written record of the day, “Amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit , with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted.”1 Although more than half the Plymouth settlers had died from disease and starvation within their first year on American soil, the survivors reportedly had more than enough food to go around that autumn. In addition to “a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent [but] good,” Winslow wrote, there was “as much fowl, as with little help beside, served the company almost a week . . . and five deer.”2 And what of the famous pumpkin pie? For most Americans, pumpkin pie is reserved for Thanksgiving, one of the most treasured of family gatherings and beloved of national holidays. Yet no one mentioned dining on pumpkin at the feast that day in Plymouth—not a word about it. William Bradford, the colony’s first governor and the only other chronicler of Plymouth’s early settlement days, poetically inventoried the crops the immigrants had propagated: “All sorts of roots and herbs / Our gardens grow, / Parsnips, carrots, turnips of what you’ll sow, / Onions, melons, cucumbers, radishes, / Skirets, beets, coleworts, and fair cabbages.”3 10 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash Neither he nor Winslow said anything about pumpkins, although by “melons” he might have been referring to the pumpkin native to the Americas. Colonists used botanical nomenclature from their homeland indiscriminately for varieties new to them. To throw the familiar history of the pumpkin into more confusion, at the time a pumpkin was not necessarily the round, ribbed, orange vegetable that most Americans know today. But what was it, and how did the Indians, Winslow, and his compatriots think about it and use it? What were the origins of and motivations for their customs? The cultural history of the pumpkin starts thousands of years ago with a small, round fruit the size of a hardball. Without hyperbole, one can say that the planting of the first pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo) seed was one of the most significant acts in American history. The pumpkin was possibly the first plant in the Americas that people brought in from the wild, cultivated, and bred for human use.4 Planting pumpkins marked a major shift from nomadic hunting and foraging to a settled, agricultural way of life, propelling the development of large-scale settlements. Initially, Native Americans living across North and Central America gathered wild pumpkins, squashes, and gourds that thrived in moist soils near rivers and creeks. Archaeologists have found no wild progenitor of the orange field pumpkin, but they have discovered its oldest domesticated seeds at Guilá Naquitz, a cave in Mexico’s Oaxaca highlands. The seeds date from 10,000 to 8,000 years ago, 2,000 years earlier than the oldest corn or bean seeds yet found.5 About 5,000 years ago, American Indians living in eastern North America independently domesticated a related group of yellow and green squashes (also Cucurbita pepo), from which zucchini, patty pan squash, acorn squash, and ornamental gourds originated.6 Butternut squash and winter crookneck (Cucurbita moschata) developed from different strains. Their oldest remains, uncovered in northwestern Mexico, date back 6,900 years.7 Buttercup and Turk’s turban squashes and ancestors of giant pumpkins (Cucurbita maxima) did not enter North America until the eighteenth century, when they arrived on the eastern seaboard aboard ships from South America.8 Cucumbers and melons, the sweeter and more succulent members of the Cucurbitaceae family, are native to India and Asia, respectively, and were an established part of European diets before American colonization.9 The domestication of cucumbers and melons dates from at least 4,000 years ago.10 Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 11 The ancient ancestors of the pumpkin were small, hard-shelled orbs about three to four inches in diameter. Although Americans today commonly refer to the pumpkin as a vegetable, it is by definition a fruit, because, like apples and berries, it is a seed packet encased in flesh and develops from a flower. Precolonial Native Americans used hard-shelled gourds for containers and even musical instruments, but they raised pumpkins and squash for food. Because the ancient fruit was thin and bitter, Indians probably first gathered and planted it for its seeds. Over the centuries, agriculturists selected and bred plants for larger seeds and sweeter, fleshier fruit.11 Why, one wonders, was one of their first projects in plant domestication a small, hard, bitter fruit? If the seeds were higher in nutritional quality, then why did they breed for the flesh? One currently popular thesis regarding the origins of agriculture is that ancient foragers desired abundant, reliable, and stable food supplies, whether in times of stress or times of security.12 Some scientists believe that people chose pumpkins because they added variety to the diet.13 Others contend that pumpkins and squashes were early domesticates because of their ease of propagation.14 In the river valleys of the Americas, pumpkins sprout quickly and produce abundant crops at prodigious rates. The pumpkin, by its very nature, drew the attention of early horticulturists. The evolution of the pumpkin from the hard, bitter orb to the fleshy pumpkins and squashes that the Indians gave Captain John Smith and other European explorers and settlers is not fully mapped out. It was a long process involving thousands of years of agricultural experimentation and adaptation.15 Scientific data on the prehistoric development of pumpkins, squashes, and gourds are continually being updated as ethnobotanists develop new research methods and make new archaeological findings. As a result, dates and trajectories of plant movements seem as elusive as the plant varieties themselves. In the American Southwest, by 2500 bce Indians were cultivating the Mexican trinity of corn, beans, and squash (of which the field pumpkin is one variety), but the crops were latecomers in other parts of the continent .16 Indian communities in what is now the eastern United States initially domesticated native plants such as summer squash, but by the end of the Mississippian period, about 1200 ce, they also grew corn, winter squash, pumpkins, and beans, which they had obtained through travel or trade.17 In an 1876 interview, Esquire Johnson, a Seneca Indian from New 12 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash York State, offered an example of how historic crop exchanges worked. His ancestors had eaten nearly “unpalatable” wild squashes until soldiers returning from “ancient wars with the southern Indians” brought back sweeter and more succulent varieties. “All these things they found on their war expeditions and brought them here and planted them and thus they abound here,” he explained.18 By the time Europeans arrived on American shores in the late fifteenth century, the Cahuillas and Pueblos in the far Southwest, the Cherokees in the Southeast, the Ojibwas along the Great Lakes, the Mandans of the Great Plains, and the Iroquois in the Northeast all propagated the vegetables . Pumpkins and squashes were never major parts of the diets of Indians of the Pacific Northwest, which was rich in other food sources, nor were they important among many of the nomadic groups, which lacked permanent settlements, but they still traded for squashes and pumpkins. Descriptions of the Indians’ propagation and use of pumpkins of various shapes, colors, and sizes were common in European travel accounts of North America.19 Christopher Columbus recorded seeing calabazas in Cuba on his voyage of 1492.20 Cabeza de Vaca, during his trip along the Florida coast in 1528, noted that “maize, beans and pumpkins [grow] in great plenty.”21 In describing the Iroquois and Ottawas in the Great Lakes region around 1670, the French Jesuit Claude Allouez reported, “All these Nations have their fields of Indian corn, squashes, beans, and tobacco.”22 Relying on the words and images of non-Indian observers to describe native traditions has its perils because of historical prejudices against American Indians.23 Nevertheless, such writings are some of the few meansavailablefordocumentingcolonialIndiancustoms.Byallaccounts, many Indian communities relied on squashes and pumpkins as basic food sources, crops second only to corn in Indian economies, oral traditions, and rituals. Pumpkins and squashes were dependable, prolific, and, in many opinions, tasty. Although Indians believed all natural objects were sacred, their origin histories and ceremonial lives attest that they considered pumpkins and squashes especially so because the fruits were so vital to their diet and therefore to their survival. Yet while all forms of squash had a special status among Indian crops, the orange field pumpkin had no special status among squash. American Indians from Canada to Florida cultivated, prepared, and thought about the field pumpkin no differently from any other squash.24 Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 13 And with good reason. The pumpkin is botanically indistinguishable from summer and winter squashes and from gourds. They all belong to the Cucurbita pepo species, which means they can crossbreed, producing a mix of forms. That happens at the time of pollination. Most cucurbit plants are monoecious, meaning that both male and female flowers form on the same stem. A tiny round fruit at the base of the female flower differentiates it from the male flower. The white and yellow tubular-shaped flowers require pollination by bees or other insects, unless a grower manually pollinates them. Bees can travel up to ten miles between fields, which can lead to cross-pollination of fruits.25 When someone discriminates one type from another, therefore, the definition is based on common custom rather than natural fact. Judging from historical descriptions and archaeological evidence, Indians in eastern North America propagated field pumpkins, gourds, patty pan squash, yellow summer squash, acorn squash, and various intermixed forms of winter and summer varieties. The motley collection of New World squashes ceremoniously set at the foot of an Indian leader in a 1621 engraving from Caspar Plautius’s Nova Typis Transacta Navigatio vividly depicts both the variety of squashes and the esteem in which American Indians held the vegetable in the seventeenth century, as well as the fascination it engendered in Europeans. In the illustration, the leader’s regal air derives not only from his tall turban and long cape but also from the large quantities of pumpkins and squashes that encircle him. The ring of dancers surrounding the royal personage and his bounty signal the high status of both man and crops. The way Indians named plants helps put the colonists’ cultural classifications , and our own, in perspective. The linguistic record offers some clues that Indians differentiated between summer squash, which have more tender flesh and ripen in early summer, from winter squash, which have harder, thicker rinds and ripen in autumn. In the Algonquian language , pumpkins and squash were called isquoutersquash or askutasquash, from which the word squash is derived.26 The term means “to eat raw” and more likely connotes a summer squash than a winter one. In describing the crops that Indians propagated in coastal Rhode Island in the 1640s, Roger Williams noted, “Askuta squash, their vine apples, which the En­ glish from them call squashes, are about the bigness of apples of several colours . . . sweet light wholesome refreshing.”27 According to reports by 14 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash Captain John Smith, who lived in Virginia from 1606 to 1609, and Robert Beverly, who visited the colony in 1705, southeastern Indians used the word macocks to identify summer squash.28 Thomas Hariot, in 1585 Virginia , reported that the local Indians used the term macoqwer or macocks for “several forms called by us Pompions, Mellions, and Gourds.”29 It was difficult, in other words, for non-natives to document Indians’ perceptions of the differences among squashes. Still, there is no indication that Indians imagined an orange field pumpkin differently from other winter squashes that filled the same dietary and medicinal needs. Many pumpkin and squash producers, such as the Iroquois and Hurons of the Great Lakes region, the southern New En­ gland native communities , and the Choctaws in the Mississippi Valley, lived in semipermanent villages. In the early 1600s, French Jesuits reported that Huron towns near Quebec each contained 50 to 100 houses, with 20 towns located in a 25-mile radius.30 Many of the settlements were probably mere shadows Plate from Caspar Plautius, Nova Typis Transacta Navigatio, 1621. The ring of dancers surrounding this Native American leader and his bounty of squashes and pumpkins signal the high status of the man and the crops. Yet American Indians at the time of European contact had no special reverence for the orange field pumpkin. Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C. Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 15 of their former selves. Diseases introduced by the Europeans and their livestock, including a viral hepatitis epidemic lasting from 1616 to 1619 and a smallpox epidemic in 1633 along the East Coast, decimated Indian populations . Some researchers estimate that foreign viruses killed up to twothirds of native populations as the viruses spread across the continent.31 Before the period of major dislocation, most Indian peoples followed an annual pattern of movement. In both the Northeast and the Southeast , agricultural production was often part of a mixed economy of hunting , fishing, trading, and gathering. Communities commonly moved from winter homes in protected lowlands to summer residences that abutted farmland and water sources for fishing: the Great Lakes in the case of the Iroquois and Hurons, and the Atlantic coast and its estuaries in the case of the southern New En­ gland and some Virginia Indian communities. Farmland was communal in most Indian societies, but many groups recognized private use and privileges over specific lots.32 Men were responsible for the major clearing of the land before cultivation, and women were in charge of crop and food production. The Indians’ shared practice of multicropping fields, their gender division of farm labor, their lack of fencing and clear property lines, and their consumption of pumpkin and squash were anathema to the new European residents, just as the Europeans’ appearance , social customs, and farming traditions were to the Indians.33 The Iroquois nicknamed squash, corn, and beans De-o-ha-ko, the “Three Sisters,” and the Onondagas named them Tune-ha’kwe, meaning “Those We Live On,” because of the crops’ significance as economic and dietary staples and because of the interconnected ways in which the Indians used them.34 Nicolas Perrot noted in about 1700: “The kinds of food which the savages like best, and which they make most effort to obtain, are the Indian corn, the kidney-bean, and the squash. If they are without these, they think they are fasting, no matter what abundance of meat and fish they have in their stores.”35 Pumpkins and squashes were probably some of the first seeds Indians planted in the spring and the last crops they harvested in the fall, because of the plants’ long growing season—up to 125 days for winter varieties, in comparison with 75 days for corn. Like squashes and pumpkins, corn and beans are easy to cultivate and produce large yields per acre. Together, they provide complementary nutrition and flavors. Furthermore, squash plants have a symbiotic relationship with corn and beanstalks.36 Each contributes beneficial nutrients to the 16 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash soil, and each serves a practical use for its partners. Cornstalks can serve as vertical poles on which bean and squash vines can climb, conserving space in the field. In turn, the canopy created by the broad leaves of the squash plants helps prevent the spread of weeds that can impede the corn and beans’ growth. Samuel de Champlain described the Indians’ multiple cropping technique while he was in and around Quebec in the 1610s. He wrote, “With the corn they put in each hill three or four Brazilian beans, which are of different colors. When they grow up, they interlace with the corn, which reaches to the height of from five to six feet; and they keep the ground very free from weeds. We saw there many squashes and pumpkins, and tobacco, which they likewise cultivate.”37 Like Smith, Champlain separated pumpkin from squash, but he did not state how or why he, or Indians , did so, nor did he indicate what he meant by “pumpkin.” Like the other travelers, he could just as likely have meant a crookneck winter squash. Theodore de Bry’s 1590 engraving of the Indian village of Secotan, on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina, is probably the first visual depiction of an American pumpkin patch. De Bry based the print on one of many drawings John White made during his trip with Thomas Hariot to document the Virginia colony six years earlier.38 The pumpkin patch is at the center of what the artists portrayed as a vibrant and stable agricultural community. Huts line one side of a central pathway and dense cropland the other. Villagers are seen both at work and at play. Some are in the woods hunting with bows and arrows, some tend a fire, others sit down for a meal, and one group participates in a ceremonial dance. The plot that White had left bare but identified as “wherein they use to sow pompions,” de Bry filled with massive, round, orange pumpkins and deep green foliage.39 The illustration suggests the significance of the pumpkin to Virginia Indians’ livelihoods, the wonder with which Europeans viewed the vegetable, and its importance as a distinguishing feature of the Americas. In most Indian communities it was as common for corn, beans, and squash to share a cooking pot as it was for them to share a plowed field.40 A half-cup of cooked pumpkin has fair nutritional value, with approximately forty-one calories, significant amounts of vitamin A, and lesser levels of vitamin C, iron, and potassium.41 Although corn was “the sole Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 17 stuff of life,” as the Jesuit priest Hierosme Lalemant noted in the 1640s, pumpkin and squash were nearly as ubiquitous at meals.42 They could be counted on to fill a soup pot when fish did not jump or corn did not grow. When the French missionary Gabriel Sagard stayed in a village on Lake Huron in 1623 and 1624, some residents offered him soup for which, he observed, “one first cooked some shredded meat or fish, together with a quantity of squash, if so desired.”43 Nicolas Perrot reported that the Indians of the Great Lakes had “in especial a certain method of preparing squashes with the Indian corn cooked while in its milk, which they mix and cook together and then dry, [a meal] which has a very sweet taste.”44 Another style of preparing pumpkins was to roast them, either whole, halved, or sliced, in the hot cinders of a fire.45 Louis Armand Lahontan wrote, “Commonly they are baked in ovens, but the better way is to roast Theodore de Bry (Belgian, 1528–1598), The Towne of Secot, engraving, 1590, made from a watercolor drawing by John White (En­ glish, c. 1540–c. 1593), 1585–86. Because of the pumpkin’s importance in many American Indians’ diets, it figured prominently, along with corn and beans, in many creation stories. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division , Washington, D.C., LC-USZC4-5267. 18 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash ’em under the Embers as the Savages do.”46 Indians also boiled pumpkin into a thick, savory sauce.47 They pounded dried pumpkin into flour, combined it with a sweetener and suet, baked it in a pan, and served it as bread or cake.48 Thomas Hariot mentioned that Indians in Virginia added ground nuts to cooked pumpkin to make it taste better.49 One of the greatest assets of pumpkin and winter squash was their ability to be preserved over the winter, when other food items were scarce. Jesuit sources from the 1630s to the 1720s noted the lack of meat in Indians’ diets.50 Probably reflecting earlier traditions, Father Joseph Lafitau remarked in 1724 that the Iroquois stored pumpkin in bark-lined underground pits, where “their fruit keep perfectly sound during winter .”51 In their memoirs from the 1680s and 1690s, the Frenchmen Lamothe Cadillac and Pierre Liette recalled how Indians near the Great Lakes preserved the vegetable for winter use.52 Indians scraped out the pumpkin to remove the seeds and stringy innards. They then cut it into slices, strung the slices together, and hung them from racks to dry in the sun. The dried pumpkin provided lightweight, convenient nourishment on trips. Packed like beef jerky, it could be carried for months with little fear of spoilage. The famous Philadelphia botanist John Bartram offered a rare report of Indians living along the Eastern Seaboard eating squash flowers in the 1740s. Western tribes fried the fresh or dried flowers and ate them alone or used them as flavoring in soups, but these practices seem to have been less common in the East than in the Southwest.53 While visiting the Onondagas , members of the Iroquois confederacy, in New York in 1743, Bartram ate a meal of “three great kettles of Indian corn soup, or thin hominy, with dry’d eels and other fish boiled in it, and one kettle full of young squashes, their flowers boiled in water and a little meal mixed.” “This dish was but weak food,” he editorialized.54 Like most native foodstuffs of the time, pumpkins and squashes served a dual function as nourishment and medicine. Cherokees and Iroquois consumed the ground seeds to provoke urination, treat kidney ailments, and rid the intestinal system of worms. Other Indians applied the crushed seeds, pulp, and leaves to flesh wounds, making use of nearly all the components of the plant for their health and nutrition.55 When the French missionary Jean de Brébeuf, at the Huron village of Ihonatiria, remarked in 1636 that “the squashes last sometimes four and five months, and are so abundant that they are to be had for almost Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 19 nothing,” he summed up the vegetable’s value as a commodity to Indians .56 Squashes and pumpkins did serve as objects of trade among Indian peoples, as Esquire Johnson noted, and between Indians and Europeans, as attested by reports of French colonists in Louisiana bartering European goods for pumpkins in the early 1700s. Yet squash never acquired the exchange value that corn did.57 Corn was vital not only as a foodstuff but also as a central currency, especially after the arrival of Europeans.58 Indians valued pumpkins and squashes less for their exchange value than as trustworthy food sources that they could count on when other foods failed. American Indians’ oral traditions chronicle the meanings Indians ascribed to pumpkins and squashes and the deep reverence they felt for them. Although it is difficult to date these stories, they presumably flourished in the precolonial and colonial eras, when pumpkin and squash production thrived in the East. Many American Indian creation stories portrayed the earth as a mother, and some communities depicted corn, beans, and squash as her daughters. For the Iroquois, each of the three plants was a guardian spirit that, if separated from the other sisters, would perish.59 They perceived squash as a life-sustaining force and personified the vegetable as a maiden of great beauty. According to one tale, the Great Spirit created the squash and her sisters at the beginning of time to provide food to sustain the human race.60 In another Iroquois creation tale, the Great Spirit walked the earth in the guise of a woman. Wherever she stepped, squash sprang up on her right, beans on her left, and corn in her footprints. In still another tale, corn and squash sprouted from the body of a sacred being or from the grave of a deceased woman. Seneca and Huron variations of this oral tradition have squash sprouting from the woman’s abdomen and head.61 Squash was a sacred ingredient in the Green Corn ceremony, a thanksgiving rite among the Iroquois and Cherokees that predates the colonial period.62 The Iroquois also held an annual feast of squash. To indoctrinate the Indians, the Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette tried to construe their 1672 squash festival in terms of his own religious beliefs. He noted: “I cheerfully attended their Feast of Squashes, at which I instructed them and called upon them to thank God, who gave them food in abundance while other tribes, who had not yet embraced Christianity, had great difficulty in preserving themselves from hunger.”63 20 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash John Bartram, during his visit to the Onondagas, recorded in his journal the following story: We perceived a hill where the Indians say corn, tobacco, squashes were found on the following occasion: An Indian [whose wife had eloped] came hither to hunt, and with his skins to purchase another [wife]. Here he espied a young squaw alone at the hill; going to her, and inquiring where she came from, he received for an answer that she came from heaven to provide sustenance for the poor Indians and if he came to that place twelve months after he should find food there. He came accordingly and found corn, squash, and tobacco, which were propagated thence through the country, and this silly story is religiously held for truth among them.64 This version of the Onondagas’ origin story conveys the significance of pumpkins and squash in their cosmology, the depth of belief in the vegetable ’s ties to the birth and survival of their culture, and the chronicler’s cultural biases. The Onondagas derived deep meaning from pumpkins and squashes because of the vegetables’ significance in their daily sustenance . And like all other Indian communities, they considered a field pumpkin to be just another squash. American Indians introduced the pumpkin to European explorers and colonists, who regarded it with the same mix of wonder and disdain with which they viewed much of North America. Just as they envisioned many Native American cultures, animals, and plants, so the colonists interpreted squash and pumpkins in terms of what was familiar to them. After the vegetable arrived in Europe, botanists and lay people alike developed a lexicon and uses for American pumpkins and squashes that suited Europeans’ definitions of nature, their taste in art, their common foodways, and their perceptions of the Americas. The word pumpkin originated in Europe. It is a derivation of the French pompion, which comes from the Latin pepo, meaning to ripen, or “cook by the sun.”65 In his 1727 Practical Kitchen Gardiner, Stephen Switzer explained that the word pumpkin had “several Greek roots which imply its aptitude to grow large and swell well.”66 Before Europeans colonized the Americas and encountered American varieties of pumpkins and squashes, a pompion connoted to them a large fruit, melon, or gourd. The Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 21 Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder stated, “When the cucumber acquires a very considerable size, it is known to us as the ‘pepo’.”67 Along with being one of earliest sources for the pumpkin’s linguistic heritage, the ancient Romans established the use of the pumpkin as an astonishingly consistent comical motif for the politician. Instead of canonizing the emperor Claudius after his death, the Roman satirist Seneca transformed him into a pumpkin. In the title of his ode to the emperor, the famous poet playfully substituted the Latin term apocolocyntosis, meaning “pumpkinification,” for apotheosis, meaning deification.68 Seneca intended the twist to demean Claudius by reducing him to a pumpkin— an empty-headed fruit. The classical scholar A. Palmer wrote that Seneca portrayed Claudius as “a paralytic, pedantic, foolish and cruel man.”69 This Roman legacy survived, and the label “pumpkinhead” has never lost its force as a word to insult a politician. Europeans resurrected ancient Greek and Roman cultural traditions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at the same time they expanded their reach around the world. As a result, the images and ideas of the pumpkin depicted in Renaissance works of art, literature, and botanical dictionaries—otherwise known as “herbals”—melded ancient concepts, uses, and botanical types with new ones based on overseas encounters. The profusion of herbals was a response to Europeans’ renewed appreciation of ancient cultures, to innovations in the printing press, and to the expansion of worldwide exploration, which added considerably to the catalog of plants.70 Herbals contain plant descriptions and illustrations, along with medicinal and practical uses for each specimen. Returning voyagers disseminated the first American pumpkin and squash seeds and specimens as exotic gifts to royal sponsors within twenty-five years of Columbus’s landing on American soil in 1492. Eventually the seeds circulated to botanists and local market vendors.71 In an attempt to bring some order to the overwhelming number of new plants seen by European explorers, herbalists often attempted to fit new discoveries into old prototypes.72 Europeans initially used terms for the better-known melons and cucumbers interchangeably with terms for the American-type pumpkins and squashes. Jacques Cartier referred to the American varieties he observed on his travels in the 1540s as gros melons.73 Sixteenth-century botanical descriptions and illustrations of fruits that resemble American pumpkins and squashes variously carried 22 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash the appellations Melopepo compressus, Pepo maximus oblongus, Cucurbita indica rotundus, Cucurbita major, and “Millions or Pompions.”74 The generic, oval-shaped, ribbed fruit labeled Cucumis turcicus (Turkish cucumber) in Leonhard Fuchs’s 1542 herbal De historia Stirpium resembles many forms of American squashes and African melons and illustrates the ambiguous and overlapping definitions of newly introduced and more familiar varieties .75 Turkish or turkie was a generic term identifying any plant that was exotic in Europe. Europeans at the time often called American corn, or maize (from the Spanish maiz after the Taino mahiz), “turkie wheat.”76 Cucumis turcicus (Turkish cucumber), illustration in Leonhard Fuchs, De historia Stirpium (Basel, 1542), 698. This is one of the earliest depictions of an American pumpkin by a European botanist, although Fuchs based its name on what was familiar to him. Courtesy Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden. Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 23 In some cases, as is likely with Fuchs’s depiction of the American pumpkin, the naturalists had no actual specimen before them. Their botanical descriptions might have been based on a word-of-mouth exchange rather than firsthand observation. With no other frame of reference , they defined or characterized new specimens by what was familiar to them. In Theatrum Botanicum, John Parkinson bemoaned his peers’ inconsistencies, complaining of “our modern writers who confound Pepo, Melopepo, and Cucurbita, so promiscuously that it is not possible to find out the distinct certaintie of them all, for some make that Pepo that others call Melopepo, and others, Cucurbita.”77 Herbalists almost never adopted American Indian terms for the native American vegetables. A rare exception was John Gerarde, in his 1633 herbal, which included “Virginia Macocke or Pompion” as a synonym for Pepo indicus minor rotundus (small round Indian pumpkin).78 Either few colonists knew of the Indian terminology or few cared. This narrow worldview would prove disadvantageous to the colonists, who would initially see American crops through European eyes and suffer the consequences. Most herbalists relied on the Aristotelian method of description, which divided the world into four elements—earth, fire, air, and water— which in turn corresponded to the four humors—dry, hot, cold, and moist.79 According to this system, all objects in nature were made up of a combination of the four elements. Sickness was caused by an imbalance in the humors; administering the opposite of the “bad humor” could restore health. For example, the herbalist John Gerarde wrote that the pumpkin was “little, thin, moist and cold (bad, saith Galen). . . . The fruit boiled in milke and buttered, is not onely a good wholesome meat for man’s body, but being so prepared, is also a most physicall medicine for such as have an hot stomacke, the inward parts inflamed. The flesh or the pulpe of the same sliced and fried in a pan with butter, is also a good and wholesome meat: but baked with apples in an oven, it doth fil the body with flatuous or windie belching.”80 Although a field pumpkin had blander flesh and a longer growing season than a sweet melon, both were edible when ripe, both had cool and moist properties, and both were rather large fruits. These similarities help explain why Europeans adopted known terminology for the newfound fruit.81 24 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash Europeans’ appetite for new American foods was indifferent at best, and their attitude toward the pumpkin was no exception. It is unclear why Europeans were slow to accept pumpkins and other New World products, such as potatoes, tomatoes, and corn, as part of their diet.82 Simple unfamiliarity could be one explanation. Another reason might have been Europeans ’ general queasiness about eating fruits and vegetables. Although the importance of plant products in combating deficiency diseases such as rickets and scurvy was well known, these foods were also known to cause stomach ailments and sickness. In the 1560s, it was even forbidden to sell fresh fruit in the streets of London.83 Remhert Dodoens’s 1586 herbal noted that the pumpkin “eaten rawe and unprepared is a very unwholesome foode, as Galen saith, for it cooleth and chargeth, or lodeth the stromache and overturneth and hurteth the same, by stirring up the pain thereof. But being boiled, baked or otherwise . . . it is not to hurtfull, for it doth coole and moisten the hot and dry stomach, slacketh thirst and cooleth the belly, nevertheless it nourisheth butte little.”84 To avoid the hazards of raw or spoiled produce, most people across Europe cooked or overcooked fresh foods. One-pot meals and stews made with bread, vegetables such as cabbage , onions, and carrots, and (for the lucky ones) meat or fish were common fare for most Europeans, from north to south. Wealthier members of society indulged in more meat and exotic ingredients from abroad.85 Europeans valued pumpkins and squashes, like many other products of nature, for food and for medicine. One herbalist recommended eating the seeds for colic.86 A pile of American pumpkin flowers displayed alongside other edible fruits and vegetables in Vincenzo Campi’s 1580 painting The Fruit Seller indicates that Italians ate the flowers in this time period, as they do today.87 On the other hand, the absence of American pumpkins in sixteenth-century Dutch cookbooks, which were expressions of upperclass tastes and culinary habits, hints at either the pumpkin’s general lack of appeal or its association with the lower class. The Shepherd’s Demand, published in Brugge (now in Belgium) in 1513, reported that pumpkins were foods that rural peasants ate.88 Just as they admired tomatoes as ornamental plants before they appreciated their culinary uses, many Europeans initially valued the image of the pumpkin more than its meat.89 During the sixteenth century, artists from Italy to the Netherlands found deep symbolism as well as humor in the prolific vegetable. Their pumpkin imagery was malleable, but it Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 25 pivoted around the central theme of being on the edge of civilization. As a sign of human nature, the pumpkin embodied unbounded lust or lack of civility; as a symbol of a place, it represented the untamed natural bounties of North America; and as an emblem of a way of life, it stood for a rustic peasant existence. Each cultural meaning informed the others and people’s appetites for pumpkins as well. The first depiction in Europe of an American orange field pumpkin appeared in the frescoes of the Villa Farnesina in Rome, created between 1515 and 1518.90 Robust, ribbed pumpkins ranging in color from orange to gray fuel the verdant imagery of nature’s bounty and fertility in a scene that celebrates the mythical love affair of Psyche and Cupid. The Italian artist interpreted the pumpkin’s exuberant size and reproductive capacities as signs not only of nature’s abundance but also of human sexuality. In the tradition of Seneca’s “pumpkinification” of Claudius, the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, in his famous vegetable compilation Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Italian, 1527–1593), Autumn, 1573. Oil on canvas, 76 by 63 centimeters . Arcimboldo’s portrait of this pumpkinheaded man and William Shakespeare’s depiction of Sir John Falstaff as a “gross watery pompion” in Merry Wives of Windsor transformed the pumpkin from a simple vegetable into a symbol of a man’s dimwittedness and selfaggrandizing . Inv. RF196432 , Louvre/Art Resource, N.Y. 26 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash portraits, equated the American field pumpkin with a man’s mental capacities or the lack thereof. In both Autumn (1573) and Vertumnus-Rudlof II (c. 1591), Arcimboldo paints an assortment of garden produce to form the outline and features of a man’s head and torso. In Autumn, the man has a pumpkin head, and in Vertumnus-Rudlof II, a pumpkin heart or chest. The artist’s strategic placement of the pumpkins suggests his commentary on his subject’s empty brain and empty heart. His clever intermingling of human and natural forms highlights their shared qualities. The portraits confounded and delighted the artist’s contemporaries and later generations of scholars. Interpretations of these vegetable portraits have ranged from allegories of the universe to “serious jokes” about the Habsburg monarchy.91 In a similar vein, William Shakespeare, in his Merry Wives of Windsor, written about 1600, characterized Falstaff, who drank and ate too much, as “this unwholesome humidity, this gross watery pumpion.”92 (Shakespeare might have had in mind the Asian melon rather than the American pumpkin, for the names and meanings were interchangeable at the time.) Both Arcimboldo and Shakespeare made the pumpkin something to laugh about. They attributed human qualities to the pumpkin, giving it a personality and ascribing its physical traits to a man, making him an empty-headed lout, a man without culture. The artists gave the pumpkin meaning beyond its mere flesh. Dutch genre painters of the sixteenth century, like the Italian fresco artists, exploited the pumpkin’s natural attributes to represent the bounty of nature. Like Shakespeare and Arcimboldo, they also made the vegetable a sign of uncultured behavior, though of a different sort. Instead of associating the pumpkin with men’s heads and a lack of intellect or refinement , Dutch artists made it a symbol of peasant women’s bodies, sexuality , and unguarded lust. They also more broadly crafted the pumpkin as a totem of a poor, rustic way of life within a rapidly developing urban and merchant society. In the sixteenth century, the Netherlands was a center of economic expansion and imperialism, an international force in the marketplace, and the home of some of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world. The era is known as a golden age of prosperity.93 The demand for religious art all but vanished as the Protestant Reformation forced out the Catholic Church, which had filled the lavish interiors of its cathedrals with paintings and sculptures. In the early sixteenth century, Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 27 the Protestant churches that gained power preferred more austere settings for worship. As a result, artists turned to the new class of merchants as patrons as well as to more secular subjects.94 At the same time, Dutch urban expansion created ready-made markets in which farmers could sell their goods. Land reclamation projects and extensive canal systems enabled farmers to get their produce to urban markets cheaply and efficiently.95 Artists such as Pieter Aertsen (c. 1508–75) and his nephew and apprentice, Joachim Beuckelaer (c. 1534–75), were part of an art movement that portrayed the work and pleasures of the peasant classes. These paintings are rich in physical detail and wit. Scenes of the everyday lives of common, rural people were not so much tributes to the rustic peasants themselves as devices by which to celebrate material wealth, communicate moral lessons and literary aphorisms, and illustrate artistic skill. As one historian explained it, artists employed the rustic motif to highlight their own artistic abilities—to demonstrate how they could turn even something as plain and simple as peasant farmers into something great.96 A common motif, which appears in paintings such as Aertsen’s Market Scene with Vegetables and Fruit (1569) and Beuckelaer’s Vegetable Market (1569), is a buxom peasant woman surrounded by a bountiful harvest. Cabbages, carrots, turnips, apples, cucumbers, peas, and large, eye-catching field pumpkins and squashes overflow from giant baskets and spill haphazardly toward the viewer in an exuberance of natural abundance. The meticulous and realistic style of these genre paintings led some historians to claim that they were “truthful” reflections of peasant life in this time period.97 Yet as in medieval illuminations, the grouping of produce such as peaches and pumpkins, which ripen at different times of the year and could not have appeared in the markets together, suggests that the images had allegorical meanings. The paintings were visual puns illustrating proverbs from emblem books—collections of old adages and riddles, which were popular at the time—and they made allusions to classical satires that were familiar to most middle-class art patrons. They also communicated more overt moral lessons about the hazards of material wealth and overindulgence. Staged alongside the women and their voluptuous fruits and vegetables are scenes of sexual titillation and innuendo. In many paintings, men lurk in the background, gazing at the female peddlers and their goods. In 28 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash Beuckelaer’s The Country Market (undated), one woman turns seductively toward the viewer, and the other leans toward a male admirer who rests a hand on her breast. The women’s open, inviting gestures are as alluring as the succulent pumpkins and melons. In Jean Baptiste Saive’s Market Stall (1594), a female produce merchant sits surrounded by her bounty. She points one hand to a child and another to a pumpkin, both products of her labor. A man leans suggestively toward her. An embracing couple in the background echoes their encounter. Like their farm produce, the women are objects of desire and fertility. They are more harlots than goddesses, unlike the mythical and benevolent Earth Mother figures, such as the ancient Greek Gaia and the American Indian Three Sisters. The paintings are playful reminders of the sins of unbounded lust and sexual promiscuity. Rustic peasant women Joachim Beuckelaer (Dutch, 1533–1574), The Country Market, undated. This painting is typical of many sixteenth-century Dutch genre paintings in its portrayal of rustic peasant women alongside voluptuous pumpkins and squashes in scenes of sexual titillation and innuendo. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy; Alinari/Art Resource, New York. Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 29 communicated these themes well because they seemingly lived closer to nature in the countryside and supposedly were less inhibited and restrained by social mores than middle-class urbanites.98 Other paintings of the period, such as Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter (c. 1662–63), which depict women writing letters and maintaining tidy houses, reflect the relatively high status of women in Dutch society, a consequence of their authority and responsibilities in the home.99 Pumpkins and other produce are absent from these more tranquil, middle-class domestic scenes. Holding pumpkins and cabbages rather than books, as in the market scene paintings, underscored women’s eroticism, their reproductive capacity, and their natural drives, which pushed beyond the limits of social decorum and propriety. The pumpkin’s sexual development from a female flower, its impressive growth rate, its fertility, and its pregnant-belly-shaped fruit evoked a more libidinous behavior. At the time when Beuckelaer and Saive painted, even scientists associated women with pumpkins. In keeping with the Doctrine of Signatures , which contended that the physical shape or appearance of a plant or animal was an indication or sign of its use, function, and meaning, the herbalist John Parkinson suggested in the 1630s that the juice of a pumpkin be “applied to private parts to restrain the immoderate lust of the body.100 What made the pumpkin a medical antidote for “immoderate lust,” an icon of fecundity in Italian frescos, a symbol of rusticity in Dutch genre paintings, and a sign of dimwittedness in Shakespeare’s plays was not only its natural attributes and its uses in Europe but also its Americanness ties—its cultural associations. After no more than a handful of Europeans had set foot on North American soil, they seized on the pumpkin as the continent’s emblem. It symbolized both the natural wonders of the continent and its perceived primitiveness, because the pumpkin was prolific, unwieldy, and used by Indians. Many Europeans conceived of North America as a paradise of lush vegetation, a virgin land just waiting for civilized people to conquer it and harvest its riches.101 Captain John Smith noted that other continents were “beautiful by the long labor and diligence of industrious people and Art. This is onely as God made it.”102 Many imagined it as a desolate wilderness that, with faith and ingenuity , could be turned into a garden. Yet as the En­ glishman George Withers noted, it was a “rude Garden” nonetheless.103 30 < Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash In texts and illustrations, almost nothing was small or ordinary about the North American continent, its inhabitants, or its flora and fauna.104 Explorers and settlers described its plants and animals in exaggerated proportions, portraying them as bigger and more exotic than they were in reality. William Wood, in New En­ gland’s Prospect, was one of many writers to offer a remark along the lines of “Whatsoever grows well in En­ gland grows as well there, many things better and larger.”105 Reports from explorers hired by commercial trading companies extolled the natural abundance and the opportunities that the rich resources promised. De Soto wrote in 1539 that pumpkins in Florida were both “larger and better than those of Spain.”106 Robert Beverly stated, “Their Pompions I need not describe, but must say they are larger and finer, than any I ever heard of in En­ gland.”107 Theodore de Bry’s 1591 engraving of the Carolina coast for his Brevis Narratio, an account of European explorations of the Americas, echoed the travelers’ sentiments.108 Disregarding scale, the artist filled the landscape with naked Indians pursuing stags, a rafter of turkeys, dense forestland , and two oversize pumpkin plants bearing voluptuous ribbed fruit.109 De Bry’s central placement of pumpkins in his iconic image of North America attests to the vegetable’s powerful hold on Europeans’ imaginations and its strength as a symbol of the continent. Pieter Cornelisz van Rijck’s Market Scene (1622) could almost be retitled New World Harvest, because it contains nearly the same plants and animals as de Bry’s scene, but van Rijck sets them in a Dutch produce stall.110 The painting helps illustrate the conceptual and actual leaps of the pumpkin from one continent to the next. Among six oversize field pumpkins and three winter squashes is a pile of Jerusalem artichokes and a live turkey (both also native to the Americas), which dominate the otherwise typical market scene. Van Rijck might have been simply chronicling the use of the native American products in Dutch kitchens at the time. Yet because playing with symbols was one of the genre’s main intentions , he more likely chose the animals and vegetables for what they represented —an archaic world. What European travelogues and visual depictions make clear is that it was not just the pumpkin’s natural proclivities that inspired its meanings and uses, but its cultural history as well. Europeans envisioned the pumpkin as inhabiting a symbolic and tangible place on the edge of civilization. Corn, Beans, and Just Another Squash = 31 The pumpkin itself and its land of origin helped inspire the imagery. The sullied associations and pragmatic uses of the pumpkin that developed in Europe before the permanent settlement of the American colonies would shape the immigrants’ appetite for the vegetable as much as their hunger would. Theodore de Bry, They Reach Port Royal, engraving in Brevis Narratio, 1591. This illustration of the Carolina coast features objects of nature native to the Americas that intrigued Europeans, including, in the center of the picture frame, the pumpkin. De Bry’s depiction of the pumpkin mimics Fuchs’s Cucumis turcicus illustration, suggesting that de Bry based his drawing not on firsthand observation but on Fuchs’s herbal. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C., LC-USZ62-380. ...