1885.] Kitchen Garden Esculents of American Origin. 661 
New England Indian “ Askutasquash—their vine-apples—which 
the English, from them call squashes,’ or ésguotusquashes, or 
“ squashes, but more truly sguoutersquashes,’® or from the New 
York Indian guaasiens4 The first vernacular use of the word 
cymling used to designate a form of bush squash (also called pat- 
typan, probably from its shape, the word pattypan signifying “a 
pan to bake a little pie in”’),> that I find is in 1648, when symnels 
and maycocks are enumerated among other edible products of the 
region at the mouth of the Susquehanna. In New England’s 
Crisis, a poem by Benjamin Thomson, in 1675, we find: 
“ When Cimnels were accounted noble blood, 
Among the tribes of common herbage food,” 
The word cushaw is Indian, and is derived from ecushaw of 
Heriot, 1586. It was applied to a bluish-green, white-streaked 
large pumpkin by Beverly,’ and the description applies to the 
Puritan squash of Burr, and also to a Florida squash grown at 
the N. Y. Agr. Exp, Station, in 1884, from seeds obtained from 
the Seminoles in Florida. The word cuckaw is now used asa 
synonym of the winter crookneck of New England, and cushaw 
or cashaw to a Southern form of like character, both of which 
have two forms, one of which is the form of the Puritan and 
Neapolitan grown at Naples, the other crooknecked. It is inter- 
esting to note that courge de la Floride is a French synonym of 
the Neapolitan’ 
The popular grouping of this class of vegetables does not con- 
form to the scientific. Gregory? offers the definition in use: 
“Grouping all the running varieties together, we express the 
marketman’s idea of a squash, as distinguished from a pumpkin, 
when we say that all varieties having soft or fleshy stems, either 
with or without a shell, and all varieties having a hard woody 
stem, and without a shell, are sguashes. While all having a hard 
stem and a shell, the flesh of which is not bitter, are pumpkins - 
and all of this latter class the flesh of which contains a bitter 
1 Roger Williams’ Key, &c., 
2? Wood, New Eng. Prosp., ay 2, Chap. VI. 
*Josselyn’s Rar., 89. 
#Van der Donck, Desc, of New Netherlands, 1656. 
5 Webster’s Dict. 
5A Desc. of New — [1648]. 
” Hist. of Va., 
* Vil., Les Pl. fade 
, Soka P 4. 
