There’s angel hair, elbows, and fettucine. There’s also gold string melon, squaghetti, and spaghetti squash. As William Shakespeare wrote, “a [rose] by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Huh?
We all know pasta is delicious, high carb, and lots of calories. What about its look-alike, spaghetti squash?
Take a deep breath.
You can have your cake and eat it too – minus 300 calories. Ask chefs Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray, and Ina Garten. Check out The Happy Cook or Food.com. They’re all fans. At 30 calories a cup, loaded with nutrients, recipes from basic to Greek-style, ragu, lasagna, and tacos, it’s an offer you can’t refuse.
How did such a quirky, good-for-you edible end up on your dinner table?
Compliments of Forest and Kim Starr, Wikimedia Commons
Spaghetti squash is a simple veggie (botanically a “fruit”) with a colorful history. The football-sized, yellow, hard-shelled veggie is available all year long. Cooking transforms it into spaghetti-like strands with a mild, slightly nutty taste that can handle just about any sauce, spice, or filling you would put on pasta.
And it’s loaded with nutrients.
Ironically, spaghetti squash has a long, but largely unknown history. It belongs in the cucurbito pepo family, which originated in the Americas. Their botanical relatives include well-known kin like pumpkin, acorn, and zucchini. Indigenous people were cultivating squash eight to ten thousand years ago.
Long before spaghetti and meatballs.
It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that migrating farmers and traders spread squash and their seeds around the world. According to Andrew Coletti in Atlas Obscura, “Wherever the seeds took root, farmers used selective breeding to develop varieties, with results as diverse as carving pumpkin, butternut, pattypan, and, in China’s northeastern region of Manchuria, what locals called yúchì guā . . . shark-fin gourd . . . referred to how its stringy flesh resembled the finely-shredded shark fin used in soup.”
While real shark fin was expensive, shark-fin gourd was cheap and plentiful. It fit the menu.
By the early 1930s, a Japanese man specializing in seeds, Takeo Sakata, came across the shark-fin gourd in the Chinese province of Manchuria. Sakata had founded Sakata Seed Corporation in 1913 – one of Japan’s top seed companies – to develop flower, fruit, and vegetable varieties. He was intrigued by the quirky squash and added it to his company’s seed catalog. Sakata bred an improved version and licensed it to Burpee Seed Catalog and other companies. Burpee called it “vegetable spaghetti.”
It wasn’t popular.
Coletti wrote that “Throughout the twentieth century, spaghetti squash continued to appear in US seed catalogs, but only as a curiosity, alongside other crops that have since failed to penetrate the American mainstream such as “peaches on a vine” (a peach-sized sweet melon) and ground-growing “almond nuts” (tiger nuts, a tuber from Africa).”
In 1963, the Chicago Tribune ran the headline, “Pity the Misunderstood Spaghetti Squash.”
That was before Dr. Harry Paris entered the game.
Harry was born in 1951 in Brooklyn, New York. He lived in Mill Basin, then a neighborhood of single-family homes with backyards. When he was 13 years old, Harry’s dad planted watermelon seeds. It inspired Harry, triggering a lifelong love of horticultural science. Harry focused on the cucurbitaceae family – gourds, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, melons, and watermelons.
“My mission is to go where no man has gone before,” Harry declared.
In 1978 Harry immigrated to Israel, joining the Department of Vegetable Crops – the research arm of Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture. His work produced many popular varieties of cucurbitaceae – including goldy zucchini, sweet acorn squash, and Orangetti (an improved version of spaghetti squash).
The story ends with a beginning.
People became more health conscious, counting calories, fat, and nutrients. “American consumers took interest in the curiously stringy gourd that had been hiding in plain sight for decades,” wrote Coletti.
Spaghetti squash went mainstream.
Today you can buy spaghetti squash in specialty stores, supermarkets, and online. You can find it at home, in restaurants, organic, or seeds. It can be cooked in an oven, microwave, slow cooker, or air fryer. Head to Amazon and you can buy cookbooks like Armida File’s The Cookbook of Spaghetti Squash and Connie Tate’s Roll On (a children’s book). There’s also Moonrise organic dried spaghetti squash, “ready in four minutes.” You can even buy spaghetti squash tee shirts.
Have your pasta and eat it too. What are you waiting for?
Yes! I love this article, and coincidentally we recently had spaghetti squash with marinara sauce for the first time and it was brilliant! Who knew? Apparently you did… Thanks for the great read and fascinating history!