Vine history (+recipes)

Photo / Babiche Martens

The humble pumpkin has served humankind for thousands of years.

I remember well the day I found out, while working as a chef at Huka Lodge in Taupo, that the blossoms and tender vines of the pumpkin plant were as edible as the pumpkins themselves.

I set about enthusiastically harvesting pumpkin blossoms in the lodge's potage garden, excited about serving them filled with crab, goats' cheese, pinenuts, basil and small cubes of roasted pumpkin.

Imagine the head chef's reaction the next day when he found his vege patch stripped of all pumpkin blossoms and therefore potential Jarrahdale pumpkins. It's a vivid memory and I have since stuck to cooking the vegetable rather than its tendrils and blossoms.

The word pumpkin is derived from the Greek word "pepon", which means large melon, and the vegetable has been a food staple for humans for a long time.

There's evidence of pumpkin-type seeds dating back to between 7000 and 5500BC in Mexico, and long before Christopher Columbus carried pumpkin seeds back to Europe from the new world - where they were grown to feed pigs - native American Indians had toasted pumpkin strips over the campfire.

They also ate the seeds (pepitas), used the blossoms in stews and dried the flesh to grind into flour, and then they dried the outside skin to make bowls.

There are four main species in the cucurbit family, of which pumpkin is a part. There's the pepo, which includes acorn squash, which has sweet, fibrous flesh, and the amazing spaghetti squash, watermelon-shaped, with an interior resembling long threads. There's the the mixta (cushaw pumpkin), with pale yellow or cream-coloured flesh; the moschata, which includes the butternut pumpkin; and maxima, which are banana-shaped pumpkins such as the trendy Japanese variety kobocha, which has a chestnut flavour. The maxima produces giant pumpkins that have weighed as much as 782kg.

As the weather warms up, heirloom pumpkins will starting turning up at farmers' markets. As with a lot of other veges, modern growers saw heirloom traits as flaws and instead developed pumpkins that offered high yields, uniformity and ease of transportation - but they forgot that the heirloom varieties are packed with flavour.

I am scheduled for a team-building exercise with the chefs at SkyCity in Auckland - maybe I should suggest a pumpkin-chucking competition using a catapult. In the United States, pumpkin-throwing is taken so seriously, they have bred a special variety to withstand heavy impacts.