Ode to the Pumpkin: Andrew Coppolino celebrates favourite fall gourd

The pumpkin does double duty at this time of the year. On the one hand, it is a signifier of the seasonal harvest.

On the other, it is a foodstuff transformed with knife, spoon and spooky artistic imagination into the Halloween jack o'lantern, an object and a word that has been in use in English since the mid-1600s.

Large and cumbersome, the pumpkin has been around for a much longer time, of course: Europeans would have seen Indigenous peoples already using it when they arrived in North America. Samuel de Champlain wrote about encountering it on his voyages to New France 1604-1608.

Pumpkin soon became a staple in colonial diets with pumpkin pie joining the holiday food traditions – so much so that when one early American colony couldn't get molasses for their recipe they delayed Thanksgiving festivities until supplies arrived.

Our interest in pumpkins and other gourds in the kitchen and on the dining room table has derived from socio-economic and class factors as well. While vegetables as a whole were thought of as fit only for peasants and animal feed in the 1500s, they began appearing on the tables of the merchant, gentlemen and noble classes about 100 years later.

Martha Stewart's stylish home tips were still centuries away, but even in the 16th century small versions of pumpkins and gourds often used for ornamental and seasonal decorative purposes, or dried and hollowed out to become containers rather than eaten. 

Pumpkins are members of the gourd family along with squash, melons and watermelons.

Botanically speaking, they are fruits because they are the seed-bearing part of the plant; however, in a culinary context they are usually considered vegetables. Regardless of whether they are used in sweet or savoury applications, the pumpkin has perhaps suffered from a steady stream of marketing over-exposure.

In the early 2000s, pumpkin-spice lattes showed up on the coffee scene and since then the pumpkin creep has persisted.

Pumpkin beer is well known, of course, and we also have pumpkin breakfast cereal, cough drops, donuts, pumpkin-peanut butter cups, martinis, salsa, and pumpkin protein powder, to name only a few.

A Canadian airline is currently promoting the fact that "pumpkin spice is in the air" with select flight sales this fall. That takes the pumpkin flavour to an entirely new height.

Despite the hyper-pumpkin flavouring, it is true that pumpkin seasoned with spices like cinnamon, cloves and allspice becomes a classic fall aroma in the kitchen, whether it's pie, muffins, cookies or simply roasted pumpkin seeds to snack on.

Eat your art

But is the Halloween jack o'lantern pumpkin — often what's known as the Howden variety — edible after the trick-or-treating is over? The answer is a yes, qualified with two caveats. First, traditional jack o'lantern pumpkins don't make for good eating: they are often watery and stringy.

Second, having your jack o'lantern carved a couple of days ahead of Halloween and then leaving it sitting around for a couple of days after the big night might leave you open to a nasty microscopic bug or two, so consider food safety as you would any other foodstuff. 

Recipes

There are some, though, who consider pumpkin seeds the tastiest part of the fall staple. For those people, here are a couple of pumpkin seed recipes, one savoury and one sweet; one simple and one a little more difficult.