Spaghetti squash
Spaghetti squash is one of the more unusual vegetables you’ll find at the farmers market.
When raw, the flesh is solid and similar to other unprepared squashes. When cooked, the flesh pulls away from the shell in ribbons or strands that look like spaghetti. and can in fact be used as an alternative to grain-based pasta.
The squash can be prepared in a variety of ways, including baking, boiling, steaming, or microwaving. It can be served with or without sauce as a substitute for spaghetti, and its seeds can be roasted, similar to pumpkin seeds.
Spaghetti squash contains many nutrients, including folic acid, potassium, and beta carotene. It is low in calories, averaging 42 calories per 1-cup serving.
It’s a winter squash with tough skin and long-term storage attributes, but it can be grown and harvested like summer squash and used in any season.
It’s also known as vegetable spaghetti, noodle squash, Mandarin squash, and vegetable marrow.
It characteristically grows on long, thin vines across a wide area, bearing many sizeable melons over a long harvest period. Newer “bush” varieties grow on shorter vines with smaller, “personal size” fruit.
When ready for harvest, it typically is a tan or pinkish color. The bush cultivars are often yellow.
All squash is native to Central America and was introduced to the rest of the world via explorers and trade routes by land and sea, and spaghetti squash was first recorded in Manchuria, China in 1850. While it isn’t known how the squash arrived in China, it was a popular food source for villages and was widely used in the countryside of northern Manchuria in the 1920s.
Images of the Manchuria area have been found that depict a woman with her child cutting spirals of spaghetti squash using a rod on a sawhorse. The flesh was commonly collected from the squashes in this way and then hung up to dry in the sun. The dried squash provided a nutritious food source that would last during the cold winter months.
The squash was first introduced to Japan in 1921 by the Aichi Prefectural Agricultural Research Station. In 1934, the Sakata Seed Co. in Japan developed an improved variety and was the first to market the spaghetti squash under the name Somen Nankin commercially.
W. Atlee Burpee and Co. brought the squash to North America in 1936 and sold seeds in their catalog under the name “vegetable spaghetti”. It was not immediately popular, and it took several years to gain acceptance. But during World War II it was used as a substitute for pasta at a time when processed foods were harder to obtain.
Today spaghetti squash is widely available at farmers markets, grocers, and through online seed catalogs in North America, Central America, South Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
