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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
Today, being a Sunday, is Time Travel Day. Back near Halloween of 2021, I wrote an entry about squash and its botanical relatives: "Squash Court"  The more I learn about squash and its relatives, the less I know. That's a bit of a cliché, but it describes my confusion fairly accurately. It's not like the cabbage cultivars, also mentioned in that entry, which are varied but somewhat limited. In contrast, there's a dizzying variety of gourdlike berries, and even calling them "berries," while apparently correct by botanical definiton, only adds to the confusion. Some are edible. Some are not. Many of the hardier ones are used as decoration, including the always-popular pumpkin. Funny thing about pumpkins. They're all over the place in the fall, which is the season when I wrote that entry. Then they disappear for like 9 months, only to reappear again the following September, along with their associated spices and, largely unrelated but important, Oktoberfest beer. It's not like we have to eat seasonally. One of the few things keeping us from sliding into full-blown dystopia is being able to eat pretty much everything year-round, including stuff from halfway around the world. Some people object to this availability. I do not. And yet, here in the middle of blasted winter, I'd completely forgotten about the existence of pumpkins until my random number generator pointed me to that entry. Sure, it's understandable, as they're a major symbol of fall, at least in my part of the world. But, for instance, zucchini (related to squash) is most definitely a summer vegetable—using the culinary definition now—but they're available year-round. Which makes them harder for me to avoid. Yes, I've gotten over my dislike of zucchini, as noted in the linked entry, but that doesn't mean I go seeking them out. The availability of the actual prompt for that entry, the delicata squash, I still don't know, and I'm not sure I've ever seen it in grocery stores or restaurant menus. One thing I neglected to do back then was look into the etymology of "squash." As a kid, I always figured it was related, somehow, to the verb. Like you're supposed to squash the stuff like you mash potatoes. This annoyed my mother, but that was just a bonus for me; it was easier to pick up bits of squashed squash and eat it with the almost-edible other stuff on my plate. So I never gave it much thought. Until now. Turns out the word squash, used for the food, is completely unrelated to the other definitions of squash (the verb or the ball game) and is, at least according to one source, from the Narragansett word asquutasquash. English people being English, that became squash. Presumably, other Native peoples had different names for it, but I can't be arsed to look up all of them. So there it is: a long-standing mystery to me, finally resolved. Now if I could just figure out all the phylogenic tangle for all their many and various relatives, I might feel a sense of accomplishment. |
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