Delicious pumpkin and squash varieties for cooking: how well do you know them?

Delicious pumpkin and squash varieties for cooking: how well do you know them?

For the next few months, there will be a pile of squash on the table in my kitchen. It’s the same story every year, partly because the cucurbiteae tribe look beautiful – give me a pile of buxom gourds in every shade of green, vermilion and yellow over a bunch of imported flowers any day. But it’s also because they are such a fantastic standby. A good, unbruised specimen with no broken skin or soft spots will last weeks, and I find it reassuring that even on a day when work has kept me at my desk, there is always the basis for supper in the house. And more than any other vegetable, a squash can take centre stage on the plate. That’s in part because of the magisterial size and striking colour, but also down to the rich sweet flavour and dense texture of many varieties. The range of varieties available – as many as a dozen in a good farm shop or greengrocer – is a fairly new phenomenon. Thirty years ago butternut squash was still an exotic, and Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book , published in 1978, has chapters on rarities like hop shoots and Hamburg parsley, as