Whence
Butternut squash
Food

Where does Butternut squash come from?

The butternut squash comes from Stow, Massachusetts, in the United States. It looks like an old heirloom, but it was bred in the 1940s by Charles Leggett, who named it for flesh 'smooth as butter and sweet as a nut'.

An amateur breeder in Stow

Charles Leggett was not a farmer but an officer of a life insurance company. In the late 1930s he bought a house in Stow that came with more than 90 acres, and he began experimenting in his garden and fields. He crossed a gooseneck squash with other varieties. According to his wife, Dorothy, he wanted a squash smaller than a Hubbard, with a compact, regular form and flesh that was easier to prepare; the town's history adds that it should ship better than a gooseneck.

Named in Waltham

Leggett took his squash to the Waltham Field Station, where Robert Young, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Agriculture (now part of the University of Massachusetts), worked with it, and the variety became known as the Waltham Butternut. By 1944 several Massachusetts farmers had switched from Blue Hubbard to butternut, and a letter of 26 December 1944 invited Leggett to a meeting of squash growers 'as the originator of the Butternut squash'. Stow's own history says it should really be called the Stow Butternut.

Why people think of Mexico

Squash itself is ancient and American. The butternut belongs to Cucurbita moschata, a species native to lands stretching from Mexico to Bolivia, and many other squash species come from Mexico. Native peoples of North, Central and South America have grown squash for at least 6,000 years, and C. moschata had spread across North America before Europeans arrived. Even the English word squash comes from the Narragansett askutasquash. But the butternut itself is a 20th-century variety, bred in a Massachusetts field.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Butternut squash ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Cucurbita ↗ · stow-ma.gov ↗ · edibleboston.com ↗ · recorder.com ↗

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