Before the invention of pumpkin pie

Natural History, Oct, 2004 by Stephan Reebs

John P. Hart, an archaeologist at the New York State Museum in Albany, has an obsession with gourds. The seeds of the wild squash, ancestor of the pumpkin, have been discovered at archaeological sites from Illinois to Maine, dating to some seven millennia ago, several thousand years prior to the earliest evidence for the domestication of squash.

Gourds, as Hart himself has demonstrated, make good fishnet floats, and they obviously also work well as containers. And when dried, their abundant seeds are one-quarter protein, nutritionally similar to sunflower seeds. But one bite into the staggeringly bitter seeds of a modern-day wild squash such as the Ozark gourd (Cucurbita pepo) makes clear that if they were eaten, it certainly wasn't raw.

At the suggestion of several attendees at his public lectures, Hart tried the method known to have been used historically by Native Americans to leach tannic acid from acorns and thus make them edible: soaking or boiling the partly crushed materials in water mixed with wood ash. Sure enough, two days of soaking, or just twenty minutes of boiling, removed the bitterness from the gourd seeds. This trick, says Hart, may have enabled the first Americans to harvest the seeds of wild squashes for food, until they stumbled on the nonbitter mutants eventually chosen for cultivation. ("Can Cucurbita pepo gourd seeds be made edible?" Journal of Archaeological Science, in press)