Squashes, Winter (Pumpkins and Other Large Types)

What’s a pumpkin, anyway? Pretty much anything you want it to be, provided it’s a hard-skinned squash. There is no correct response. The group has no botanical (or other) distinction. Local usage dictates. What is considered “pumpkin” changes from country to country and region to region. In the United States, for example, the term generally denotes rounded orange squash carved for Halloween and pureed for Thanksgiving pie— nothing more precise. (By the way, canned “pumpkin” is processed not from this round orange thing but from what North Americans call squash—as in Butternut.) In the British Isles, any one of the list above could be a pumpkin.