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Speaker 1: Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, BrainStuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. It's officially fall here in the Northern Hemisphere, which means some of us have visions of pumpkin spice lattes dancing in our heads. Or maybe mugs of a nice hearty squash soup. The latter is more my style, but only because if I have too much sugar, someone's going to have to deal with me. But whatever your preference, weirdly enough, the same species of winter gourd is often used to make both. And it's not the type of pumpkin you're probably thinking of. Certainly, in the United States, when we think of a pumpkin, we're usually thinking of the large, sturdy gourds you can dig the seeds out of and carve into a jack-o'-lantern. These are varieties of the species Cucurbita peepo, which are known for having flesh that's juicy and stringy. They're in the same wide species as spaghetti squash and zucchini. The types of quote-unquote pumpkin that get processed into the canned pumpkin you might buy to make a pie or latte are generally of the species Cucurbita muscata, which are known for having flesh that's firmer and smoother. This is the species that gives us calabazas and butternut squash. The specific variety grown for Libby pumpkin pie filling in the U.S. is the Dickinson, which is a large, pale-tan oblong type. People like to argue about whether it should be properly called a squash or a pumpkin. Some of those people work for the brand Libby. Anyway, varieties or cultivars of both of these species vary widely and were developed by humans specifically for those varying traits. C. muscata contains a whole mess of mostly winter squashes, which are types of squash harvested when they're fully mature, usually in the fall. They have thicker skin and tend to keep pretty well for a few months at room or cellar temperature. This is opposed to summer squash, which are harvested when they're still immature, in the summer. They're more delicate and perishable, and will usually last a week or two in the fridge. Today, let's talk about one of those varieties of Sea Moscato winter squash, the aforementioned butternut squash. This variety is fairly omnipresent today, and not just in the United States. Of the global market for this squash, which is worth well over a billion dollars a year, about 55% comes from outside of the Americas entirely. If you're the kind of person who enjoys looking up recipes on the internet, you can find all sorts of different soups, stews, and bakes incorporating butternuts from all over the world. But although squashes in general have probably been part of human diets for as long as there have been humans, butternut squash was only developed less than a century ago on farms outside of Boston. The Gourd family, Cucurbitaceae, arose in what's now India some 63 million years ago and spread out from there, jumping from Asia to Africa to South America in a bunch of different distribution events. Maybe birds ate their seeds and flew across Cretaceous-era oceans, or maybe the sturdy hollow gourds themselves floated over open water. Maybe both, a number of times. This eventually resulted in the genus Cucurbita, which arose in South or Central America at least 9 million years ago. Later, humans there picked these plants up and started domesticating them, selecting them for different desirable traits, like sweetness or storage hardiness, pretty much as early as humans were domesticating things. There's evidence that C. peepo was domesticated there 10,000 years ago. That's when folks around the Mediterranean were working on domesticating wheat. And looking at C. muscata … In what's now the southeastern United States, remains of sea moscata have been found in settlements dating back to around 2000 to 1500 BCE. So we've been enjoying these squash for a long time. Skipping ahead a few millennia to the 1940s CE, the popular varieties of winter squash grown in the northeastern United States were a little unwieldy. You had the Blue Hubbard, which was a lot bigger and heavier than most home cooks are used to wrangling today. There were also curved neck squashes like the Gooseneck that are very pretty, but longer and weirder and more difficult to stack for shipping. So, a fellow by the name of Charles Leggett from the town of Stowe, Massachusetts, decided to do something about it. Although Leggett was a life insurance agent by trade, the house he'd bought for his family 30 miles west of Boston was came with about 90 acres of land. For our metric friends, that's about 36 hectares of land some 50 kilometers outside of Boston. Anyway, Leggett took to experimenting in the garden in his free time. One of his goals was to come up with a squash that was smaller and easier to handle and prepare than the varieties that were on the market. he wound up bringing one of his developments to the nearby Waltham Field Station, then a research facility in affiliation with the Massachusetts College of Agriculture. There, a professor by the name of Robert E. Young helped Leggett refine the variety into what's now officially known as the Waltham Butternut Squash, so named because it's as smooth as butter and sweet as a nut. Within just a few years, it had already started replacing local crops of the Blue Hubbard, And over the next few decades, it made its way across the country and the world. It's still a source of local pride, though. At least part of Leggett's farmland was redeveloped in the early 1990s as a golf course, joining other golf and or country clubs in the area. And the new owners named it the Butternut Farm Golf Club. But, okay. The plant that butternut squash grow on is a type of annual vine, meaning it needs to be replanted every year. Those vines are thick and sort of bristly, and can trail along the ground or be trained up a scaffold of whatever kind. It'll produce broad, lobed leaves, and during the early summer, will bloom with big, showy, bright yellow flowers. The flowers are also edible, and if you happen to grow your own butternut squash and have too many blossoms, you can bread and fry them, maybe stuffed with some nice goat cheese. But if you don't eat them and they are pollinated, they'll develop fruit. Yes, a butternut squash is a fruit. Botanically speaking, it's a berry. Yes, strawberries are not berries. Butternut squash and bananas are. A butternut will start out small, with a greenish-white striated skin, and be kind of intrinsically cute-looking. It often resembles a slightly weird peanut, like drawn by Pendleton Ward. the squash's skin will deepen and brighten to a golden tan color of the course of the summer as it grows and matures. When you pick a butternut squash, you want to leave a couple inches of stem on and then cure them by keeping them in a warm, dry place for a few days at least. After that, they should be stored in a cool, dry-ish place. During all of this curing and storing, butternuts will convert some of their starches into sugars and develop a deeper orange flesh color. meaning they'll become tastier and more chock-full of micronutrients, being that precursors to vitamin A are responsible for those orangey pigments. Science has shown that butternuts need a couple months in storage to really develop post-harvest, and they'll keep for another few months after that. Despite this, the squash's skin is very thin and is edible. It's a little chewy or tough-ish when cooked. which you might like for a contrast in texture, or you might want to peel off to maintain smoothness depending on your application. You scoop out the seeds and their stringy webs before cooking. The seeds are also edible and tasty when toasted. Farmers have developed a number of sub-varieties of butternut, with differences in flavor, color, size, shape, environmental preferences, time to harvest … and have given a lot of them cutesy names like honey nut, brulee, and nutter butter. The typical butternut squash will be around a foot long and maybe half as wide and weigh about two to four pounds. That's about 30 centimeters long and weighing a kilo or two. But they can get much bigger. The Guinness World Record for the heaviest butternut squash was achieved in Germany in 2024. The squash in question weighed 137 pounds. That's 62 kilos. This is the sort of category that frequently gets toppled, by the way. Sport squash growers, which, yes, is a hobby that people take part in, employ all kinds of tricks, like shaded tents and supportive hammocks, to provide ideal big squash conditions. There wasn't a new winner for heaviest butternut in 2025, though, and as of this recording, it's a little early yet for word on 2026's champion squash. We'll update you if there's an upset. Today's episode was written by me, Lauren Vogelbaum. For more on the butternut squash, check out the episode of my food podcast, Saver, called Falling for Butternut Squash. BrainStuff is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, BrainStuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. It's officially fall here in the Northern Hemisphere, which means some of us have visions of pumpkin spice lattes dancing in our heads. Or maybe mugs of a nice hearty squash soup. The latter is more my style, but only because if I have too much sugar, someone's going to have to deal with me. But whatever your preference, weirdly enough, the same species of winter gourd is often used to make both. And it's not the type of pumpkin you're probably thinking of. Certainly, in the United States, when we think of a pumpkin, we're usually thinking of the large, sturdy gourds you can dig the seeds out of and carve into a jack-o'-lantern. These are varieties of the species Cucurbita peepo, which are known for having flesh that's juicy and stringy. They're in the same wide species as spaghetti squash and zucchini. The types of quote-unquote pumpkin that get processed into the canned pumpkin you might buy to make a pie or latte are generally of the species Cucurbita muscata, which are known for having flesh that's firmer and smoother. This is the species that gives us calabazas and butternut squash. The specific variety grown for Libby pumpkin pie filling in the U.S. is the Dickinson, which is a large, pale-tan oblong type. People like to argue about whether it should be properly called a squash or a pumpkin. Some of those people work for the brand Libby. Anyway, varieties or cultivars of both of these species vary widely and were developed by humans specifically for those varying traits. C. muscata contains a whole mess of mostly winter squashes, which are types of squash harvested when they're fully mature, usually in the fall. They have thicker skin and tend to keep pretty well for a few months at room or cellar temperature. This is opposed to summer squash, which are harvested when they're still immature, in the summer. They're more delicate and perishable, and will usually last a week or two in the fridge. Today, let's talk about one of those varieties of Sea Moscato winter squash, the aforementioned butternut squash. This variety is fairly omnipresent today, and not just in the United States. Of the global market for this squash, which is worth well over a billion dollars a year, about 55% comes from outside of the Americas entirely. If you're the kind of person who enjoys looking up recipes on the internet, you can find all sorts of different soups, stews, and bakes incorporating butternuts from all over the world. But although squashes in general have probably been part of human diets for as long as there have been humans, butternut squash was only developed less than a century ago on farms outside of Boston. The Gourd family, Cucurbitaceae, arose in what's now India some 63 million years ago and spread out from there, jumping from Asia to Africa to South America in a bunch of different distribution events. Maybe birds ate their seeds and flew across Cretaceous-era oceans, or maybe the sturdy hollow gourds themselves floated over open water. Maybe both, a number of times. This eventually resulted in the genus Cucurbita, which arose in South or Central America at least 9 million years ago. Later, humans there picked these plants up and started domesticating them, selecting them for different desirable traits, like sweetness or storage hardiness, pretty much as early as humans were domesticating things. There's evidence that C. peepo was domesticated there 10,000 years ago. That's when folks around the Mediterranean were working on domesticating wheat. And looking at C. muscata … In what's now the southeastern United States, remains of sea moscata have been found in settlements dating back to around 2000 to 1500 BCE. So we've been enjoying these squash for a long time. Skipping ahead a few millennia to the 1940s CE, the popular varieties of winter squash grown in the northeastern United States were a little unwieldy. You had the Blue Hubbard, which was a lot bigger and heavier than most home cooks are used to wrangling today. There were also curved neck squashes like the Gooseneck that are very pretty, but longer and weirder and more difficult to stack for shipping. So, a fellow by the name of Charles Leggett from the town of Stowe, Massachusetts, decided to do something about it. Although Leggett was a life insurance agent by trade, the house he'd bought for his family 30 miles west of Boston was came with about 90 acres of land. For our metric friends, that's about 36 hectares of land some 50 kilometers outside of Boston. Anyway, Leggett took to experimenting in the garden in his free time. One of his goals was to come up with a squash that was smaller and easier to handle and prepare than the varieties that were on the market. he wound up bringing one of his developments to the nearby Waltham Field Station, then a research facility in affiliation with the Massachusetts College of Agriculture. There, a professor by the name of Robert E. Young helped Leggett refine the variety into what's now officially known as the Waltham Butternut Squash, so named because it's as smooth as butter and sweet as a nut. Within just a few years, it had already started replacing local crops of the Blue Hubbard, And over the next few decades, it made its way across the country and the world. It's still a source of local pride, though. At least part of Leggett's farmland was redeveloped in the early 1990s as a golf course, joining other golf and or country clubs in the area. And the new owners named it the Butternut Farm Golf Club. But, okay. The plant that butternut squash grow on is a type of annual vine, meaning it needs to be replanted every year. Those vines are thick and sort of bristly, and can trail along the ground or be trained up a scaffold of whatever kind. It'll produce broad, lobed leaves, and during the early summer, will bloom with big, showy, bright yellow flowers. The flowers are also edible, and if you happen to grow your own butternut squash and have too many blossoms, you can bread and fry them, maybe stuffed with some nice goat cheese. But if you don't eat them and they are pollinated, they'll develop fruit. Yes, a butternut squash is a fruit. Botanically speaking, it's a berry. Yes, strawberries are not berries. Butternut squash and bananas are. A butternut will start out small, with a greenish-white striated skin, and be kind of intrinsically cute-looking. It often resembles a slightly weird peanut, like drawn by Pendleton Ward. the squash's skin will deepen and brighten to a golden tan color of the course of the summer as it grows and matures. When you pick a butternut squash, you want to leave a couple inches of stem on and then cure them by keeping them in a warm, dry place for a few days at least. After that, they should be stored in a cool, dry-ish place. During all of this curing and storing, butternuts will convert some of their starches into sugars and develop a deeper orange flesh color. meaning they'll become tastier and more chock-full of micronutrients, being that precursors to vitamin A are responsible for those orangey pigments. Science has shown that butternuts need a couple months in storage to really develop post-harvest, and they'll keep for another few months after that. Despite this, the squash's skin is very thin and is edible. It's a little chewy or tough-ish when cooked. which you might like for a contrast in texture, or you might want to peel off to maintain smoothness depending on your application. You scoop out the seeds and their stringy webs before cooking. The seeds are also edible and tasty when toasted. Farmers have developed a number of sub-varieties of butternut, with differences in flavor, color, size, shape, environmental preferences, time to harvest … and have given a lot of them cutesy names like honey nut, brulee, and nutter butter. The typical butternut squash will be around a foot long and maybe half as wide and weigh about two to four pounds. That's about 30 centimeters long and weighing a kilo or two. But they can get much bigger. The Guinness World Record for the heaviest butternut squash was achieved in Germany in 2024. The squash in question weighed 137 pounds. That's 62 kilos. This is the sort of category that frequently gets toppled, by the way. Sport squash growers, which, yes, is a hobby that people take part in, employ all kinds of tricks, like shaded tents and supportive hammocks, to provide ideal big squash conditions. There wasn't a new winner for heaviest butternut in 2025, though, and as of this recording, it's a little early yet for word on 2026's champion squash. We'll update you if there's an upset. Today's episode was written by me, Lauren Vogelbaum. For more on the butternut squash, check out the episode of my food podcast, Saver, called Falling for Butternut Squash. BrainStuff is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by Tyler Klang. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
