Pumpkin

Americans—even southern Americans—tend to associate pumpkins with New England, New England’s pumpkin pie (the rival of sweet potato pie at the Thanksgiving table), and Halloween jack-o-lanterns. But the Native peoples of the southeast grew a number of varieties of what we now call pumpkin—Cucurbita pepo, Cucurbita mixta, Cucurbita maxima, Cucurbita moschata. Several old forms of pumpkins have come down to us, along with a rather distinctive set of pumpkin foodways: the Seminole pumpkin, The Tennessee Sweet Potato Pumpkin, and South Carolina’s own Dutch Fork Pumpkin.