true dirt

The Halloween squash has been on my mind lately. I ran out on October 30 to get one for the next night’s candy fest and could only find little ‘kins which took a lot longer to carve than the big ones. Sometimes my hand didn’t fit through the hole I had carved. I am the only person in my neighborhood to put out a carved and candle-lit squash jack o’lantern though several distribute candy. The kids love the pumpkin faces and tell me so. But I’m beginning to feel like the weird lady on the block–with my “naturalized” front lawn and native plant wilderness and other oddities. But the kids come for the candy and the construction paper cutouts on the door, and the jack o’lanterns.
The Halloween traditions are an odd bunch. I remember my first October in Maine when I saw what looked like a man in overalls sitting on his front porch. Except he was headless. By Halloween I had figured it out. All the headless stuffed figures in plaid flannel shirts and overalls or granny dresses on country porches suddenly sported pumpkin heads on All Hallows Eve.
These Halloweens the kids often arrive at my front door from their parent’s cars idling on the street. There are too few open doors to be able to walk from one to another. The costumes are a little different than in my youth. Though fairy princesses and toddler brides are still the number one outfit for little girls, African-American boys favor football jerseys, the Latino boys Mexican wrestler masks, and the Asian-American boys still like Ninja Turtles. Oddly, pillowcases rank among the top candy-catchers. But I also dropped mini-Kit Kats and Sweettarts into cupped hands.
Now that carved pumpkins are becoming a rarity in these parts I began to wonder about the origins of our fading tradition. And I still don’t know where or who made the first Halloween lantern from a carved pumpkin. But I did find out that in the mid-1600s one made a pumpkin “pie” by removing “…the inner watery substance with the seedes…” and filling up “…the place with Pippins and having laid on the cover which they cut off from the toppe to take out the pulpe they bake them together and the poor of the citie as well as the country people doe eat thereof as of a dainty dish.”
The recipe comes from one of the well-known gardening books of the era, Paradisi in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris, published in England in 1629 and written by John Parkinson–botanist, apothecary, and, after publication of “Paradisi,” First Botanist to Charles I. I know about John Parkinson and his pun-intentionally famous book (Paradisi in Sole = park-in-sun, i.e. a pun on the author’s last name) from the wonderful writer and invaluable source on the history of American gardens, Ann Leighton.
Leighton wrote two books on the history of American gardens–”Early American Gardens” and “American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century.” Both are fascinating compilations of meticulous research, and I thumb them frequently for one-of-a-kind insights into my ancestor gardeners’ habits and practices. She has great lists in these books. Here’s a bit of one from John Winthrop, Jr.’s grocer’s bill:
“Bought of Robert Hill gr(ocer) dwelling at the three Angells in lumber streete 26th July 1631.” Among the two columns of purchased seed, including basil, borage, bugloss, burnett, columbine, cabbage, hollihock, lettuce, leeks and marigolds, are “8 oz pompion seed at 2s 8d per li”, making the total purchase of pumpkin seeds “1s 4d”. The grocer was in London and the seeds were shipped to the colony of Massachusetts on the vessel “Lion” captained by a Mr. Pierce in the summer of 1631. The “s” probably was a shilling. But I don’t know what a “d” is. What is certain is that the squash – the pumpkin or pompion (from the Greek “pepon” which became the Latin “pepo” and is part of the pumpkin’s botanical name, Curcurbita pepo) was making a round-trip from Mexico, via London, back to the New World of America.