A star rating of 0 out of 5. Delight dinner guests with these stuffed baby squash, made butternut squash recipes mixed grains, mushrooms and tarragon.
This website is published by Immediate Media Company Limited under licence from BBC Studios Distribution. Australia and New Zealand as butternut pumpkin or gramma, is a type of winter squash that grows on a vine. It has a sweet, nutty taste similar to that of a pumpkin. The word “squash” comes from the Narragansett word askutasquash, meaning “eaten raw or uncooked”. Although Native people may have eaten some forms of squash without cooking, today most squash is eaten cooked.
Native Americans believed that it had extreme nutritional properties and would bury their dead with it to sustain them on their final journey. The late-growing, less symmetrical, odd-shaped, rough or warty kinds, small to medium in size, but with long-keeping qualities and hard rinds, are usually called winter squash. Percentages are roughly approximated using US recommendations for adults. All three species of squashes and pumpkins are native to the Western Hemisphere. Hubbard, Delicious, Marblehead, Boston Marrow, and Turks Turban, apparently originated in northern Argentina near the Andes or certain Andean valleys. At the time of the Spanish invasion, it was found growing in these areas and has never since been found elsewhere except as evidently carried by humans.
Since this plant requires a fair amount of hot weather for best growth, it has not become very well established in northern Europe, the British Isles, or in similar areas with short or cool summers. Only long-vining plants are known in this species. Cushaw and Winter Crookneck Squashes, and Japanese Pie and Large Cheese Pumpkins, is a long-vining plant native to Mexico and Central America. Both are important food plants of the original people of the region, ranking next to maize and beans.
The flowers and the mature seeds, and the flesh of the fruit are eaten in some areas. Before the arrival of Europeans, C. North America where they could be grown. Still, they had not been carried into South America as had beans, which originated in the same general region. They were generally grown by indigenous people all over what is now the United States. Many of these peoples, particularly in the west, still grow a diversity of hardy squashes and pumpkins not to be found in commercial markets.