Return of The Squash

BY ADRIANA JANOVICH

Its appearance intrigued me. Never before had I seen a squash quite like it. It was reminiscent of a Hubbard—hardy and rounded in the middle—only this winter variety, the Latah squash, sported a light peach-colored skin, capped on one end by a dusty blue-gray knob, like a child’s squat spinning-top toy. “What’s it like inside? And how do you like to cook it?” I asked Brad Jaeckel, who manages Eggert Family Organic Farm at Washington State University and had just pointed out to me the relatively unknown heirloom variety. I had come to the farm to pick up winter greens, storage onions and shallots. Now I was considering this rather robust and unusual-looking squash.

Brad explained his favorite uses were in soups or for baking, and that the flesh was bright orange and creamy. I was sold—and not just on that one first Latah squash but several more throughout that fall and winter. For puréed soups and pasta. For a simple mash. For Thanksgiving pie.

Latah squash is perfect in Thanksgiving pie. Roasted and mixed with sugar and warming spices, its flesh is smooth and velvety, even without the addition of condensed or evaporated milk or heavy cream. But, like many other squash varieties, Latah is versatile. It’s delicious in both sweet and savory dishes and can be substituted for almost any other winter squash.

And don’t worry about the fact that you’ve most likely never heard of it until now. Besides Pullman’s Eggert Family Organic Farm and Moscow’s Affinity Farm, there aren’t many places that offer Latah squash—at least not yet. The good news is you can make a trip to Pullman or Moscow this season to stock up.

Or, you can easily grow your own.

Snake River Seed Cooperative, which specializes in regional heirloom varieties, first offered Latah squash seeds online last year. This year, packets reached seed racks in stores such as the Moscow Food Co-op.

Brad, the main Latah squash seed steward for the co-op, named the cultivar of Cucurbita maxima for Latah County, where Larry and Joanne Kirkland have been cultivating it in their backyard garden for nearly five decades. And, before Joanne brought it to Moscow, her father and her grandmother—and possibly her great-grandmother—grew the squash near Horseshoe Bend, north of Boise, where her ancestors homesteaded in the mid-1800s.

In her family, it was simply called “The Squash.” And it was the only squash her family grew. “It was a staple in our household,” Joanne says. “We would eat it all winter.”

It was served as a side, prepared, she says, “like you would mashed potatoes.” And that’s largely how the Kirklands continue to consume it today. She compares it to pumpkin.

“I like this better than pumpkin,” her husband interjects. He also likes it roasted. That way, “it seems to have more flavor.” Plus, he says, “Baking it makes it easy to handle. If you bake it, it comes right out of its shell.”

While the squash came from his wife’s family, he is the gardener of the pair. He plants the seeds directly into the ground in mid-May, after the last frost, typically sowing about a dozen per season.

Another reason he likes “The Squash” so much: it’s “foolproof. It doesn’t take more than a week for it to come up. It comes up pretty fast.”

The fruits generally range in size from 5 to 8 pounds but can get bigger. And they look “pretty much” like the ones Joanne’s father grew. But, Larry says, his father-in-law’s were “perhaps a bit smaller.”

He describes them as “turban or crown-shaped. I like the large ones that are in the 10-plus pound range that get reasonably hard shells and keep well in the winter. The smaller and softer shelled ones I cook up first in the fall.”

For decades, Joanne’s father wouldn’t share the seeds. He guarded them carefully, like a family secret or secret recipe or family heirloom. Near the end of his life, he had a change of heart, granting the Kirklands permission to start sharing the seeds. “He said, ‘I’m not going to last forever, but I want the squash to last forever,’” Joanne recalls.

She began sharing the seeds with a few people she knows—friends and family in and around Moscow and as far away as Arizona and Virginia, but it didn’t do well in either remote location.

The variety thrives on the Palouse, from Pullman to Horseshoe Bend and Moscow, where Brad first encountered the squash in 2005 at a friend’s home. He was over for dinner, didn’t recognize the variety, and asked about its origins. The friend had gotten the squash from another friend, who had gotten it from Larry and who gave Brad some seeds.

He first planted the squash in 2006 at his own private Orchard Farm, which largely otherwise grows herbs and flowers for his wife’s soap-making business, Orchard Farm Soap. In 2007, he also planted some at the WSU farm.

Since then, he’s been cultivating the seeds at his home farm and donating some of the seed crop to the WSU farm, where he’s been selling the squash and slowly increasing the yield for 16 seasons.

He named the squash “for the county that it has spent a lot of time in.” And, despite its great traits, “it’s never been a hot-seller,” he says. “It’s a pretty unusual squash, and it’s pretty big. You’ve got to be brave when you tap a Latah. It’s a lot of squash to work with.”

His look a little different from the kind in the Kirklands’ backyard. Brad’s are less like a turban or crown and more like a Hubbard, only a light salmon color and with just a hint of greenish gray-blue near the knobby top.

When I show Joanne a photo on my phone, she says, “I wonder if Brad got his crossed?”

Later, when I show Brad photos of the Kirklands’ squash, he wonders that, too. There was a time, he notes, he and a WSU researcher were conducting an experiment at his farm, attempting to cultivate a crimson-and-gray squash—the school colors of WSU. “It is possible,” he muses.

The first time I cut into one, I think it smells faintly of cantaloupe. Its flesh isn’t stringy or watery but rich and dense. And there’s a lot of it. Fortunately it freezes well.

I visited the Kirklands at their Moscow home early this year to learn more about the squash, which by this point—just over two years after trying one for the first time with Brad’s encouragement—had become a favorite. Joanne tells me her grandmother, Anna Olsen Fry, “lived a few miles down the hill and across the river” from her childhood home. “She was a farm wife, growing food for a lot of people. Her squash patch was way bigger than ours.”

Joanne remembers her grandmother had “a big earth cellar” where she stored the squash and other vegetables, such as onions and potatoes. She speculates the squash dates to the decades following the Boise Basin gold rush, when her great-grandmother, Cora Olsen, came to Idaho from Wyoming with her family. “She had a truck garden and sold veggies to the miners”—and loggers and ranchers, Joanne says. “We can only guess the squash was part of that.”

Joanne shows me a photo: a black-and-white portrait of four generations of her family. And Larry shows me the patch where he grows the squash, separated from other vegetables in their well-tended garden.

The Kirkland’s harvest their squash in late-October and are often finishing last year’s harvest as he’s cutting the new fruit for the coming winter. “It’s such an excellent keeper. We cooked one up last week,” Joanne tells me, “and it was as good as gold.”

I bought seeds from the co-op and am looking forward to growing my own. If you grow your own garden vegetables, you might consider this heirloom variety, too.

Like Brad, I’m hoping Latah squash catches on, becoming more popular with gardening enthusiasts and consumers in the Inland Northwest. Until then, it means more trips to the WSU farm—and more Latah squash—for me.