Summer Squash

There is a redundancy in the name summer squash, because in its earliest sixteenth and seventeenth-century American usages the word squash by itself meant those soft-fleshed cucurbits eaten by humans in the summer. It was distinguished from hard-fleshed gourds and round pumpkins, associated with fall and winter, and the latter as much with stock feed as with human consumption. In the South, summer squash was used to categorize a group of squashes consumed over the summer—yellow crookneck, cymlings, zucchini—and to specify the flattened patty pan bush squash that was also called the cymling in the American colonies. There was a broadness to the name that verged on imprecision. There were squashes that were not reckoned summer squashes—late season, large vegetables such as the Cushaw, the Tennessee Sweet Potato Squash, the Cherokee Candy Roaster Squash—and the New England Hubbard and Winter Crook Necked Squashes. New Englanders repeatedly stated a preference for the winter squashes, while in South Carolina the cymling summer squash and the yellow crookneck enjoyed preference. The distinction? “The summer squash have thin skins and rather soft seeds and are tender and succulent, while the winter squash have heavy rinds, starchy and fibrous flesh, and heavy, large seeds” (1938). Until the 1930s, South Carolinians only recognized the cymling and the yellow crookneck as summer squashes. In the mid-1930s, the zucchini joined the category.