Every year, many millions of Americans engage in an amateur art contest, showing self-reliance and ability at handywork, displayed outside their homes. I am not referring to the somewhat commercialized Christmas time decoration-and-illumination; but to the Holloween presentation of a carved-out pumpkin, with a lit candle inside, to look spooky, grace the porch and thus welcome children on their trick-or-treat circumambulation.
This note will present the pumpkin itself. The etymology of its name in Latin, cucurbita, is disputed. This word migrated, in Renaissance times, into alchemy. In it this is a large glass vessel, comparable in shape to a pumpkin, in which chemicals were heated for usually long periods of time. An example of its use is the commentary of plate number 5 of the Mutus liber (1677) alchemical treatise: “The two dew collectors enter the laboratory and pour
their supply into a cucurbit. The liquid must be used in all its freshness in the distillation operation which ends on a high heat. The handlers then prepare to release the container which collected the product of the distillation and which is four-fifths full, a rigorous proportion. The distillation having stopped, the wife removes from the cucurbit, with a spoon, the four coagulation particles which remain at the bottom. She transfers them into a bottle which she hands to a man of athletic build, naked, standing and unbalanced, his right foot
placed on a small elevation: a way of depicting the lame Vulcan mythologicalgod.“
In English, several words refer to different species of cucurbitaceae, “squashes,” “pumpkins,” “zucchinis,” or “gourds.”
The plant iself is extremely ancient. Seeds from Pleistocene gourds were retrieved in Florida and were dated using radiocarbon techniques : about 12,500 years BP. Domestication of this plant family is likewise ancient, it started around 11 000 years ago in the New World and Asia. As the Homo species started populating the New World, it used fire to deforest and provide land use. Domestication of squash, pumkin, gourds, etc date from that remote
time.
Seeds were collected for their high nutritional value and tastiness once the toxic substances were rinsed out. Nonbitterness of the pulp, as with other plants, apparently was the selected trait trait favored early during domestication. The bitterness arises from cucurbitacins, molecules from the family of steroids. Study of genomic data shows removal to have been
achieved convergently, through selection. For Cucurbita pepo, the proposed ancestor of the domesticated populations of México is C. pepo ssp. fraterna from northeastern Mexico, while the putative progenitor of the cultivars in North America is C. pepo ssp. texana from the Eastern United States.
To return to the Halloween tradition, about the time of the publication of Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow (1848), the pumpkin first appeared in its incarnation as a jack-o’-lantern. This art form is thus about 150-years old.