The Lamb family's breakfast of champions consists of cake. Is anyone walking through the Yakima Herald-Republic on this Sunday morning after Thanksgiving with a big slice of pumpkin pie to accompany their leftover coffee?
The Yes. Libby's produces 85% of America's canned pumpkin and is made from Dickinson's pumpkin. To fill enough to bake 90 million pies each year, harvest begins in August at Morton Farms in Illinois.
The label on the Libby's box says the contents are 100% pumpkin, and that's true. Legally speaking, it can be any pumpkin with a hard shell. There are no botanical differences to distinguish these two members of the Cucurbitaceae family.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, canned “squash” is prepared from “a clean, healthy, properly ripe, golden-fleshed, firm-skinned pumpkin” and sweet. Since no authority distinguishes between pumpkins and their relatives, pumpkin food processors are free to label their products as they see fit.
Long before humans arrived in the Americas, researchers speculated that wild pumpkins bloomed that looked less like large melons and more like small, hard balls with a bitter taste.
30,000 years ago, the continent was home to giant herbivores, including mastodons, ground sloths and gonphotes. We know these mammals fed on wild pumpkins because they left their remains in their dung for archaeologists to discover.
In the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, archaeologists have found pumpkin seeds that are 7,500 years old. When the new people arrived, they probably started eating non-bitter varieties of gourd. Unknowingly, they began the long process of hybridizing the species we know today.
This process continued when the “Dickinson” variety was developed specifically for Libby. Dickinsons were created from a cross between a squash and a squash. They are large and beige in color. They don't look much like the orange Jack-O-Lanterns we associate with pumpkin pie.
Libby's uses Dickinson because today's consumers, like our early ancestors, believe that some pickles taste better than others. Dickinson has a better flavor and creamier texture than other squashes or squashes. If you've made Halloween pumpkin puree from leftover jack-o-lanterns, you know that the flesh can be watery and tough, not very sweet, and less colorful than Libby's products.
If you prefer to make your own stuffing, Dickinson's closest relative is pumpkin. You can't buy Libby squash in the supermarket. This is extraordinary.
While we're reviewing the data, what about the delicious meals we're reheating for dinner tonight? Chances are it's not myrrh.
What most of us call mashed potatoes are French fries. Although they share some similarities, true yams and sweet potatoes are not botanically related. The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) belongs to the morning glory family (Convolvulaceae), while the yam tree belongs to the Dioscoreaceae family. The edible parts of sweet potatoes are also the roots. We eat pulp tubers.
None of this has anything to do with potatoes (Solanum tuberosum), which we usually eat as chips or potato chips.
Katik The sweet potato is grown in Peru. In 750, when Columbus arrived in 1492, Native Americans were growing sweet potatoes, and George Washington grew them on his farm in Virginia.
95 percent of yams are grown in Africa. The word “Yam” comes from the verbs “nyam”, “nyami” or “nyambi” from African dialects, meaning “to taste” or “to eat”. African slaves probably applied this name to the American sweet potato, which replaced the root vegetable primarily grown in West Africa.
Candles can be found at ethnic markets across the United States. Compared to candy, noodles are stiffer, drier and not very sweet. They have a more cylindrical appearance with rough, crusty skin. Most yams have white flesh, but there are also some red, yellow and purple varieties. They are similar to white russet potatoes in taste and consistency, but contain more fiber and complex carbohydrates. Yams can be the size of a small potato or a monster measuring over 5 feet long and weighing over 100 pounds.
Compared to yams, sweet potatoes are shorter, with the thick middle section tapering on both sides. There are different varieties with orange, purple or even white flesh.
The USDA requires that if the term “yam” is used to describe a sweet potato, it must also be labeled as a “sweet potato.” Unless you buy special pasta, you'll almost certainly be reheating sweet potatoes tonight.
• Carol Barani and her husband, John, found paradise on a 1 1/3-acre property west of Franklin Park, where they raised three children and became master gardeners. Contact her at florabundance14@gmail.com.
