Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Summer Squash
Surely, zucchini must have been with us always. It is one of the most widely grown crops in
the world, with substantial harvests in North and South America, Europe, India, the Middle
East and Asia. More than 6 million tons of summer squash are grown every year around the
world, with zucchini accounting for the lion's share in almost every location. Sometimes it
seems that much is grown in each of our neighborhoods alone. Every summer we struggle
to come up with new ways to cook it, fighting to keep our heads above what seems to be a
rising tide of squash. We stuff it, stew it, saute it, steam it and serve it raw in salads. And
still we never seem to make a dent.
So it may come as a surprise to learn that zucchini, which seems so ancient, is actually a
relatively modern invention, probably dating back no earlier than the turn of the twentieth
century. According to squash historian Harry Paris, the first recorded mention of zucchini
came in a 1900 Italian seed catalog. It probably didn't make its way to the United States
until after World War I, brought by Italian immigrants to California.
Why the doubt? How hard can it be to spot a zucchini? Actually, it can be pretty danged
difficult. Certainly, there were cylindrical green summer squash harvested much earlier
than the twentieth century. A basket of them, flowers attached, appears in Fruttiven- dola,
a well-known sixteenth-century painting of a fruit and vegetable merchant by Vincenzo
Campi. But those aren't zucchini. They are cocozelle, one of zucchini's forebears. There
are also records of cylindrical green squash being harvested throughout the eastern Medi-
terranean since fairly shortly after Columbus's voyages. These are not zucchini either, but
marrow squash. To make matters even more confusing, all three of these are just broad fam-
ilies; within each are dozens, if not hundreds, of individual varieties. And those are just the
cylindrical green ones. Summer squash also come in other colors and shapes. At the Newe
Ya'ar Research Center in Israel, Paris grows more than 320 varieties he has deemed of spe-
cial interest.
Making sense of all this squash is not nearly as complicated as it may seem. Start with
the cylindrical green ones, since they are now the most popular. Zucchini are dark green
and show little or no taper along their length (they are roughly the same circumference at
the flower end as at the stem end).
