Smologies #29: PUMPKINS with Anne Copeland
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Oh, hey, it's your friend who's at the mall and texts you photos of jeans that cannot possibly be the new thing. Please tell me how wasted with no pockets is nothing. Please. Allie Wart back with another episode of Ologies. We're just leaning into this season. Crunchy leaves, wood smoke, scarves, glowy little lights in the darkness. This episode...

Oh, pumpkins. This is an amazing episode. And this is also Smologies. So Smologies are shorter episodes of classics, and this is one of our best, but

But we've edited them down so that there are no swear words and also so that they're just shorter, they're classroom friendly, they're kid friendly, they're the whole family friendly. So enjoy this Smology's version of pumpkins. If pumpkins were a person, I'd be down to be their roommate. They seem chill. They seem friendly. They seem down for a good time. Like they would come in clutch with a pep talk when you need it. To Kerpetology!

Okay, what in the David S. Pumpkins is this word? David Pumpkins? I mean, are we supposed to know who that is? I know you have questions. Okay, I looked it up. Cucurbitology comes from the Latin for gourd. And yes, cucurbitology looks like cucumbers because they're related. We're going to get into that later. But also, I'd like to note that the word pumpkin comes from the French for pom-pom, which came in a winding, viney way from the Greek...

Pepo, which means to be cooked by the sun. Genus and species of most pumpkins, Cucurbita pepo, a gourd that's been cooked in the sun. So I was looking for a pumpkin expert or someone who studies pumpkins or a pumpkin scholar, but not just the science of pumpkins, but also the emotions and the folklore and the history. And I came across a book entitled...

Pumpkin, pumpkin. Folklore, history, planting hints, and good eating. By someone who loves pumpkins so much, she studied them intensely and wrote a whole book about them. We chatted about what is a pumpkin? How long have we been carving them up and cooking them down? How many varieties are there? What else are they used for? How do you pick out a good one? What are the biggest myths and the biggest pumpkins?

So light a little candle, enjoy the flickering and cozy wisdom of cucurbitologist Anne Copeland.

I'm a senior. I'm going to be 78 November 22nd, which falls on Thanksgiving every so many years. And that's how I, one of the ways I come to love pumpkins. You must have had a pumpkin pie for your birthday every year. Oh, I always had pumpkin pie, pumpkin cake, pumpkin soup, pumpkin, you name it. And now getting to how to pick a pumpkin. Uh-huh. How?

Do you pick a pumpkin? What are we looking for? It's going to be different every single time you go. It's going to be different. The color's going to be different. The shape of the pumpkin's going to be different. The size of it, whether it has a stem at the top that's long, it's going to change every year. I mean, it's magic. Every year you'll know it when you see it. And it may take a long time to figure it out, but that's half the fun of getting one.

So, for a decorative pumpkin, use intuition, you can summon your spidey sense, tap into some witch's magic and just get magnetized to the right one. Now, if you're going to eat it, the darker the green stem and the orange skin mean it's ready to be picked, ready to be purchased, and you can hold it up to your ear and you can thump it. And the louder that hollow echoey sound, the better the pumpkin.

And side note, if you ever need to lovingly threaten someone, say, for Venmoing you for enchiladas when you said they were your treat or not texting you the second they get home safe, you can always say that you'll thump them on the pumpkin. That's been a word family threat for years, and it translates to, I love you. How dare you? And now what about some varieties of pumpkins?

Oh, there are a lot, a lot, a lot of pumpkin varieties. Now, a pumpkin is not a typical fruit. It's also not a vegetable. Oh, it's not a vegetable? No, it's not a vegetable. It's a fruit? No, well, sort of. Uh,

A pumpkin, believe it or not, is a berry. Oh, what? It's a berry. How? Why? It's a berry. Because it said, I'm going to be a berry. And it's berry true. It's a frickin' berry, y'all. It's a frickin' berry. And I looked it up, and so are cucumbers. And...

Avocados are a berry. Bananas are a berry. Eggplants are a berry. These are berries. They are fleshy seeded fruits. They're formed from a single flower containing one ovary. Boom. Berries. Anne says that the biggest flim flam, she's here to debunk,

is that pumpkins are not a vegetable. And in her book, she calls the pumpkin a botanical platypus. But refer to them as a vegetable. She might thump you on the berry. So yeah, you have a lot of fun with pumpkins because there's a lot of really different things about pumpkins. They come in different sizes, shapes. They were grown in Mexico way, way back, even before the Incas and so forth.

They were grown in China way, way back. And what are some of your favorite varieties of pumpkin? I like there's a pumpkin that is green, that has stripes, and sometimes it has red and green. And they're very small. I think they're called kielbasa.

Okay, these little pumpkins are Japanese and if you google image search "kobacha" in Japan, you will find all manner of pumpkins. But to English speakers, "kobacha" means a short, squat squash that you've probably had in tempura. And you either save it as the last piece you eat as a treat or you eat it first.

because life is short and someone at the table may say, "Ooh, can I have some of your tempura?" And you want the pumpkin one for yourself. You gotta eat it fast. P.S. Australians call all kinds of squash pumpkin. It's calabesa in Spanish and candied in Mexico for Day of the Dead festivities. And the British used to call them pompions.

Now, the smooth doorstep pumpkins we're used to in America are Connecticut field pumpkins. And the smaller ones that we make into pies are sweet sugar pies. And there are Gerundale blue pumpkins, Casper white pumpkins. The bumpy ones are called peanut. There's Long Island cheese pumpkins because they look like a cheese wheel. There are others called white ghost, warty goblins, and baby boo. Essentially, just come up with a new pumpkin and give it your cat's weirdest nickname,

You're good to go. Tell me a little bit more about the history of pumpkins. So South America, the Incas, and then at what point did they start growing them in North America and Europe? I mean, they're pretty much grown on every continent. Right. Well, they figured that the American Indians were growing them for a while. They just may not have looked...

like the pumpkins we have today. They might have looked more like a squash, for example. They might have been smaller. They believed that the seeds were very healthy for you, which they are. So they believed that they would take away like parasites and things like that. So they would eat the seeds and dry them and eat them. Okay, sad. How

ancient are pumpkins? Did they come from aliens? Probably not. Scientists have found seeds that are over 7,000 years old. I think they originated in Central America as smaller, more bitter little gourds. And indigenous populations all over the continent have for centuries used pumpkins in stews, dried them, they use them in medicine. Squash blossoms, which also side note,

Amazing fried. Thank you very much. Those were used for skin injuries. And from 1836 to the mid 1900s, pumpkin seeds were recognized as a remedy for intestinal infections. And more recent research has been on the L-tryptophan in pepita seeds, helping with symptoms of depression.

which part of that is probably just sitting there cracking them with your teeth, is so dang, dang fun. Also, according to Kaiser Permanente's website, there have been pumpkin seed medical trials showing promise in reducing kidney stone risk and helping with a parasite that comes from snails.

So your glowing porch orb contains a little botanical wizardry. You mentioned earlier that pumpkins are magical. Oh, absolutely. Talk to me a little bit about how you feel about pumpkins. Yeah, I mean, it's not just the pumpkin itself. It's the whole season that it ushers in. It's all the good things that we know and love, getting together with friends,

changing our personality via a costume. Halloween, quick reminder, is the eve of All Hallows Day to honor saints. And the tradition of dressing up comes in part to embody the costume that you're wearing and partly to scare off the demons that are just chilling, waiting to cross the boundary into death the next day. Now, some researchers have found a link between higher caloric intake in the colder months attributing

it to old kind of hard wiring for storing up on fat before a fast. So Halloween is the time to dress up in order to ward off evil and also to eat all the candy you can because death looms close and the fruit trees will be bare in the winter. It makes sense.

And now, what is some of the folklore surrounding pumpkins? Because I'm thinking like people stepping into pumpkins as carriages. We got Ichabod Crane out there. We got all kinds of stuff. Oh, there's myths that involve pumpkins from other lands where they actually believe that humanity came from a pumpkin. P.S. I did look this up in a 2001 article from the journal Economic Proliferation.

Botany catalogs several creation myths from different Asian cultures, most of which involve people surviving a great flood by floating in a hollow pumpkin, or the birthing of a pumpkin, yowch, that's cut into many pieces to form people. But historians think that the pumpkin plant didn't even make it to Asia until post-Columbian times, but this folklore has been passed down through enough oral and written tradition that it stuck.

And here in America, there are old stories from Southern communities and African-American communities about riding pumpkin vines into new lands since they grow so fast, just like hop a pumpkin vine like a bullet train. And also stories about convincing Europeans that pumpkins are donkey eggs. Now, moving on to bigger and gianter topics. What about them big old honking pumps?

And how do people grow those huge giant pumpkins? Oh, that's quite an effort. Yeah, they do have seeds for those. However, they don't necessarily grow to be big on their own. You have to kind of baby them along. And one of the things a lot of people do is that once the pumpkin starts growing, they have to keep it turned.

and they have to keep it moving so that it doesn't squash its own leaves and everything and prevent it from growing. So they have to put something under it. You know, it could be cloth, it could be hay or whatever, but they put something under it. Some of them feed the pumpkins with milk. What? Yeah, they do. They do. There's a lot of different ways they can do things, and of course,

Growing the biggest pumpkin is a longstanding thing that's happened. Oh, and back in the early colonial days, when people would get their hair cut, they used to put a pumpkin, half a pumpkin, on top of their heads. And they even named the town Pumpkinshire because that's how they would cut their hair. They would just cut it around the pumpkin like that.

P.S. New Haven in particular was known for this look, and like Instagram photos of Rosé at brunch, it spread quickly and gave New Englanders the nickname pumpkin heads. Now Boston, hi, hi Boston, you were once known as Pumpkin Shire. So the next time you enjoy some baked beans from Beantown, just think, wow, you could be Pumpkin Munchin instead. So let's say you need a haircut in several months, so you've decided to grow a pumpkin. Does Anne have any tips?

First, she says, have a space about four feet wide and 30 or 40 feet long. Or, or you can train your vines to grow in a circle around the rest of the garden. Isn't that cute? She says, plant five or six seeds in each mound. And then when they start to sprout, you got to thin them out.

and pluck a couple. Let only the best chew grow. She says it's going to be heartbreaking, but it's worth it. Now, her book has more growing tips about hot capping them, coddling them in cold weather, keeping them cozy as they start their journey to pumpkin town. And

I guess Pumpkin Shire. They grow into the fall, and there's a few types that can even grow into the winter. Wow. So, yeah, it just depends how they're grown and where they're grown and what they put into it to how they will grow. Do you have a favorite movie involving a pumpkin? I guess Cinderella mainly. I think that's everybody's favorite, her and that pumpkin. Beepity-boppity-boop.

Carriage, you know, that's pretty classic. I can't think of any others that I've seen right offhand, but that's one I always liked a lot. Okay, P.S. The Tale of Cinderella dates back over 2,000 years and has taken various forms. Now, the version with the pumpkin carriage was far from a Walt Disney invention, so don't give him props. That part of the story was whipped up in the 1600s in France. What about pumpkin carving tips? Yes.

Pumpkin carving tips. I'm not good at carving pumpkins, but I'll tell you why. I have carved a pumpkin or two, but after a while I got to where I didn't really want to carve them. I really wanted to paint them or to do something else with them. For some reason, I just didn't like to cut them up unless I was cooking them. Yeah. So. You know, you are not the only cucurbitologist I have heard say that. I understand that there is a movement to cook, not carve.

Because it's like, we put all this water and resources into this, you're just going to let it rot on the porch? That's true. That's true.

P.S. Tempura, not to be confused with tempura, or acrylic paint works well on pumpkins. And if you're like, why am I seeing so many turquoise colored pumpkins? What's this trend? That is the teal pumpkin project. And on someone's porch, it's a sign that there are non-food treats being given out. So if your kiddo, or shamelessly you, trolling your neighborhood as an adult for goodies, is allergic to peanuts or gluten, those houses are like, I got you covered, willing

With like a fake tattoo, some silly putty. So keep an eye out for those. Can I ask you questions from listeners? Sure. Okay. Okay, real quick. Before we get to Patreon questions, we may have a few words about some sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate each week to a cause of theologist choosing. And this week, Anne chose Shriners Hospitals for Children because...

children and their sense of magic and wonder have a special place in her giant heart. So Shriners Hospitals for Children is a network of 22 nonprofit medical facilities across North America. So thank you to Anne for choosing them and to some of the sponsors for making it possible.

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Let's get to your questions. Meg Mahaly asks, and I think a lot of people probably have the same question, where did the jack-o'-lantern originate? The jack-o'-lantern actually originated a long time ago. And we think back around when Stonehenge and all that was, well, was active. Let me put it that way. They think that it goes back that far.

and that Jack was like comparable to the devil, and he had to be sort of punished, and he had to carry around a light so that people wouldn't be afraid of him, that they would know he was coming. Here's Johnny! So it goes back a long way. Again, we only know from things that have been written, and we don't know...

in a lot of cases, how truly accurate they are. So I'm doing my best to give a correct answer. Okay, it's also been said that Irish and Scottish kids used to carve their jack-o'-lanterns

out of turnips or potatoes. And let me tell you, they look like tiny baby mummy heads and are so much scarier by so much many multitudes. And in this tale of Jack and the devil, so some versions say that a guy named Jack tricked the devil and then trapped the devil in the tree. And so the devil condemned Jack to wander the earth

just hoofing it around, carrying a hot coal and a turnip. Is that to mimic the devil Jack's lantern that he has here? Probably, and also so that it would light the way for people in the dark in the wintertime. And it wasn't really...

like Halloween as we know it now, it used to be called Samhain. And Samhain was a different, it was connected with Celtic people. And so it was a different sort of holiday then. Okay, so quick aside. Samhain was...

also pronounced Samhain, is a Gaelic festival and it celebrates the Celtic pagan new year and the end of the harvest season and into the cold times. And feasts are had, costumes are donned, fairies are appeased, neighbors are shaken down for treats, and spirits are invited to come kick it before they cross over. And if you're like, Dan,

Day of the Dead. Día de Muertos. What a nutty coincidence. It's the same day. That Mexican holiday honoring and celebrating the gone and not forgotten used to be celebrated in the beginning of summer pre-Spanish colonization but gradually it got moved to late October to fit in with western Halloweeny things. Oh, Naomi Berry wants to know what's the deal with white and pink pumpkins? How do they make

them like that? They don't make them. They cross-pollinate them and they grow new varieties when they can. Now, white pumpkins have been something that they wanted to develop for a long time and they finally were able to. They've had red pumpkins, reddish. Let's put it this way. They're more red than they are orange. So if they cross the red with the white, chances are they'll get the pink. But the pink is, you don't see...

Mini pink. Yeah. It's more rare. So if you get a chance to get a pink pumpkin, by all means, get one.

These, by the by, are called porcelain doll F1 varieties or rascal F1s. And they are light, light, peachy pink, lumpy, but hearty with deep ribbing. Now, this next question was also asked by patrons Morgan, Ashley, Katie Coast, Sam Taylor, Laura Kinney, and Joe Porfino, who simply wrote, what's with pumpkin guts?

Jacob Farmer wants to know, why is it sometimes really easy to get the goop out of the inside of the pumpkin and sometimes it's really hard? Because the pumpkin hasn't either fully matured and there are some varieties. Think about making spaghetti noodles. If you take them out too early...

They're really hard to get out of the pan. And they're harder to deal with if you get them out when they're just ripe, then they're pretty easy to deal with. So it's possible that the pumpkin isn't fully ripe. If the skin is really rough and really thick,

sometimes it doesn't want to let go of the seed. That's great advice. I never realized that. Becky Woodruff has a great question. She wants to know, what's with those bags of teeny tiny pumpkins in the produce aisle? Are they baby pumpkins? Or does that type naturally grow to that size? You know, there's little

Actually, those are a special variety, and they grow them that way. They're never going to get big. They're grown to be small like that. And those last pretty much a long time. Yeah. Because they are small. They don't tend to rot, especially if you don't carve them up, if you're just having them sitting there. Yeah, they're total desk pumpkins. Yeah, they'll last. Okay, side note.

what are those tiny, tiny pumpkins that Linda from accounting has on her desk from like August 31st until December 1st? Okay. They have many names among them. Baby boo, bumpkin, munchkin, baby Pam, we be little hooligan, mischief, trickster. Again, supporting my theory that you can just name a new pumpkin after your cat. Also, you know, those weird teeny ones that grow on sticks that are always in the floral department.

Those are eggplants, which

Which are berries. Trust no one. Trust no one! Brianne Wharton wants to know, why do pumpkins get the weird wart-looking thingies? Oh, well, it's partly how they're grown and also the variety. Some pumpkins are going to be very lumpy and bumpy because it's part of their genetic makeup. And others will have a really smooth skin. I like the ones that have little wart thingies on them because they're...

They're different. You know, they're their own little characters. And to me, it makes them look more interesting. So warts and all. You love them warts and all. Yep. Okay, I looked this up because Ella Sugarman and Sarah also had questions. And pumpkin warts are called... Are you ready for this?

Warts. They're just called warts. And they can be caused by water imbalances, viruses, bugs, or just genetics. But these pumpkins all deserve hugs anyway. Okay, one last question. Pumpkins and gourds, are they different?

Oh, yeah, no, they're very different. Yeah, they're very different. Gourds are more closely related to squash, but they're not even that either. They're their own little thing, and they have a very, very hard shell.

And when they are ripe, they're very, very hard. You don't eat gourds, generally speaking, but you can paint on them. You can carve them. You can do all kinds of things like that.

So they have their creative side too. And I love gourds. I've seen some absolutely fabulous gourd art carved, painted, and otherwise. Oh, one more thing about Anne's work. I literally forgot to ask her what her favorite thing about pumpkins are. So I sent her a quick email and she wrote right back and said, My favorite thing about pumpkins is that they, like we are, constantly evolve from year to year. They never become boring. And each new generation looks forward to them with great anticipation.

Woohoo! Thank you from my heart and always. It's been a joy to be here and I wish all the people out there who are getting ready to celebrate the fall, I wish you all a happy autumn and a happy holiday season. And you know what? Do it your way. You have permission to be who you are and who you like to be best. So go out and enjoy Halloween. Yeah. Thank you so much. Okay. Take care. This was great.

So ask smart folks questions because chances are what caused them to seek the answer was the exact same curiosity that you got. Now, Anne Copeland's book is delightful as is she. Her book is called Pumpkin Pumpkin, Folklore, History, Planting Hints and Good Eating. There's tons of recipes in it. You'll find a link in the show notes and more links as always are up at alibor.com slash ologies.

Also linked is AllieWard.com/Smologies, which has dozens more kids safe and shorter episodes you can blaze through. And thank you Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media for editing those as well as Stephen Ray Morris

And since we like to keep things small around here, the rest of the credits are in the show notes. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I give you some advice. And some advice is if you want to draw on your pumpkin before you carve it, but you don't want to use a Sharpie or something permanent in case you change your mind, you know what's a great idea?

is an eyeliner pencil or a lip liner pencil. So ask someone who wears eyeliner, hey, can I borrow that? I might use a lot of it. And then you can just wipe it off if you decide to change your mind in the middle of your carving. I literally did this last week when I carved a pumpkin. Okay, bye-bye. Small geez. Small geez. Small geez. Small geez. Small geez. Small geez. It's a great pumpkin. He's rising up out of the pumpkin pile.

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