A Harvest of Pumpkins
- Lifestyles
- Special Interest
Author: Aramco World Magazine
Released 21 November 2006
Aramco World Magazine, October 1958
Autumn in America brings Halloween fun, Thanksgiving Day family reunions, and the pumpkin colors of harvest time. They go together like the mix of a savory pumpkin pie. According to a pleasant fable this association began on the first Thanksgiving Day. The feasting over, the Pilgrims' governor called for attention, unsheathed his sword and held it out to tap a wooden trencher, saying: "Hail, pie of the pumpkin! I dub thee Prince of Thanksgiving Day."
Like many legends this one is true in spirit at the cost of strict accuracy. It is true that the Plymouth settlers quickly learned about pumpkins from the Indians. To this day many farmers follow the Indian practice of planting pumpkins between corn rows. They continue an arrangement that brightens the fall landscape as well as providing a harvest of pies. After the first frost, when the cornstalks have been cut and stacked, the golden yellow pumpkins match the sun's color, a last light of the growing season before the white snows and long nights of winter close in.
Pumpkin seeds have been found in pre-Columbian cliff-dwellings of the Southwest, so it is entirely possible that the Pilgrim Fathers could have had access to the ingredients for pumpkin pie. But they didn't have it, nor did they even list turkey on the first Thanksgiving menu. They sat down to a table of venison, wild fowl, eels, mussels, clams, leeks, water cress, and wild plums. It was more than 50 years before Americans gave annual thanks for pumpkin pie.
The hobgoblins and pranks of Halloween were imported from Ireland. Elements of half-forgotten Celtic rites marking the death of summer were carried to America by the Irish immigration which followed the potato famine of the 1840s. In short order the Irish love of the fantastic carved spooky pumpkin-face jack-o'-lanterns to haunt the nights of late October.
The most marvelous pumpkin of all became Cinderella's coach. It was probably transformed from a gourd now considered a squash, a giant type first grown in Asia and Europe. In their prime these squash can weigh from 75 to 200 pounds. Pumpkins and squash are closely related members of the cucumber family. The pumpkin, like tomatoes, peppers, and corn, develops from a flower. That makes it a fruit and not a vegetable.
Pumpkin patches yield one of the lesser cash crops. Grown in most states, the largest part of the crop is canned or frozen for pies. In the United States and Europe pumpkins are also used as animal fodder.
The pumpkin got its name from the Greek-word pepon, meaning "mellow." The 10-20 pounds of the American field pumpkin rules it out for magic coaches, but otherwise its performance statistics rate high. The pumpkin is one of the fastest growing plants, sometimes achieving 5 inches of new vine a day. A single pumpkin seed in 24% weeks of growing time puts out nearly 2,000 feet of vine and 20 pumpkins, enough for 500 pies.
Though they may not appreciate it, New Englanders are sometimes called pumpkin heads. They are said to have brought i t on themselves by a blue law that required men to have their hair bobbed to the edge of a cap. Some say that instead of a cap a half pumpkin was often used. New Yorkers of the 1860s thought it clever to express admiration for a leading citizen by acknowledging, "He's a pumpkin." Twenty years' later Henry Ward Beecher was the first to denote excellence by the phrase, "It's some pumpkins."
A recent contribution to pumpkin lore may have been suggested by the Indians' use of pumpkins as containers. Or it may have been inspired by a poem of anonymous authorship:
“Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her;
He put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well."
John Greenleaf Whittier in his poem, The Pumpkin, asked, "What brings back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?" Come Thanksgiving Day and everybody present will remember the first verse of the song that begins, "Over the river and through the wood." How many can sing all the way to the last line: "Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!"?