September 30, 2026 • 10 mins
Humans started domesticating edible gourds thousands of years ago, but one of today's most popular varieties has been around for less than a century. Learn about the history and science behind butternut squash (plus how big the heaviest on record was) in today's episode of BrainStuff.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, BrainStuff. Lauren
Vogelbaum here. It's officially fall here in the Northern Hemisphere,
which means some of us have visions of pumpkin spice
lattes dancing in our heads. Or maybe mugs of a
nice hearty squash soup. The latter is more my style,
(00:23):
but only because if I have too much sugar, someone's
going to have to deal with me. But whatever your preference,
weirdly enough, the same species of winter gourd is often
used to make both. And it's not the type of
pumpkin you're probably thinking of. Certainly, in the United States,
when we think of a pumpkin, we're usually thinking of
(00:44):
the large, sturdy gourds you can dig the seeds out
of and carve into a jack-o'-lantern. These are varieties of
the species Cucurbita peepo, which are known for having flesh
that's juicy and stringy. They're in the same wide species
as spaghetti squash and zucchini. The types of quote-unquote pumpkin
that get processed into the canned pumpkin you might buy
(01:07):
to make a pie or latte are generally of the
species Cucurbita muscata, which are known for having flesh that's
firmer and smoother. This is the species that gives us
calabazas and butternut squash. The specific variety grown for Libby
pumpkin pie filling in the U.S. is the Dickinson, which
is a large, pale-tan oblong type. People like to argue
(01:30):
about whether it should be properly called a squash or
a pumpkin. Some of those people work for the brand Libby. Anyway,
varieties or cultivars of both of these species vary widely
and were developed by humans specifically for those varying traits. C.
muscata contains a whole mess of mostly winter squashes, which
(01:52):
are types of squash harvested when they're fully mature, usually
in the fall. They have thicker skin and tend to
keep pretty well for a few months at room or
cellar temperature. This is opposed to summer squash, which are
harvested when they're still immature, in the summer. They're more
delicate and perishable, and will usually last a week or
two in the fridge. Today, let's talk about one of
(02:15):
those varieties of Sea Moscato winter squash, the aforementioned butternut squash.
This variety is fairly omnipresent today, and not just in
the United States. Of the global market for this squash,
which is worth well over a billion dollars a year,
about 55% comes from outside of the Americas entirely. If
(02:36):
you're the kind of person who enjoys looking up recipes
on the internet, you can find all sorts of different soups, stews,
and bakes incorporating butternuts from all over the world. But
although squashes in general have probably been part of human
diets for as long as there have been humans, butternut
squash was only developed less than a century ago on
(02:56):
farms outside of Boston. The Gourd family, Cucurbitaceae, arose in
what's now India some 63 million years ago and spread
out from there, jumping from Asia to Africa to South
America in a bunch of different distribution events. Maybe birds
ate their seeds and flew across Cretaceous-era oceans, or maybe
(03:19):
the sturdy hollow gourds themselves floated over open water. Maybe both,
a number of times. This eventually resulted in the genus Cucurbita,
which arose in South or Central America at least 9
million years ago. Later, humans there picked these plants up
and started domesticating them, selecting them for different desirable traits,
(03:41):
like sweetness or storage hardiness, pretty much as early as
humans were domesticating things. There's evidence that C. peepo was
domesticated there 10,000 years ago. That's when folks around the
Mediterranean were working on domesticating wheat. And looking at C.
muscata … In what's now the southeastern United States, remains
(04:01):
of sea moscata have been found in settlements dating back
to around 2000 to 1500 BCE. So we've been enjoying
these squash for a long time. Skipping ahead a few
millennia to the 1940s CE, the popular varieties of winter
squash grown in the northeastern United States were a little unwieldy.
(04:24):
You had the Blue Hubbard, which was a lot bigger
and heavier than most home cooks are used to wrangling today.
There were also curved neck squashes like the Gooseneck that
are very pretty, but longer and weirder and more difficult
to stack for shipping. So, a fellow by the name
of Charles Leggett from the town of Stowe, Massachusetts, decided
(04:44):
to do something about it. Although Leggett was a life
insurance agent by trade, the house he'd bought for his
family 30 miles west of Boston was came with about
90 acres of land. For our metric friends, that's about
36 hectares of land some 50 kilometers outside of Boston. Anyway,
Leggett took to experimenting in the garden in his free time.
(05:06):
One of his goals was to come up with a
squash that was smaller and easier to handle and prepare
than the varieties that were on the market. he wound
up bringing one of his developments to the nearby Waltham
Field Station, then a research facility in affiliation with the
Massachusetts College of Agriculture. There, a professor by the name
of Robert E. Young helped Leggett refine the variety into
(05:29):
what's now officially known as the Waltham Butternut Squash, so
named because it's as smooth as butter and sweet as
a nut. Within just a few years, it had already
started replacing local crops of the Blue Hubbard, And over
the next few decades, it made its way across the
country and the world. It's still a source of local pride, though.
(05:51):
At least part of Leggett's farmland was redeveloped in the
early 1990s as a golf course, joining other golf and
or country clubs in the area. And the new owners
named it the Butternut Farm Golf Club. But, okay. The
plant that butternut squash grow on is a type of
annual vine, meaning it needs to be replanted every year.
(06:13):
Those vines are thick and sort of bristly, and can
trail along the ground or be trained up a scaffold
of whatever kind. It'll produce broad, lobed leaves, and during
the early summer, will bloom with big, showy, bright yellow flowers.
The flowers are also edible, and if you happen to
grow your own butternut squash and have too many blossoms,
(06:34):
you can bread and fry them, maybe stuffed with some
nice goat cheese. But if you don't eat them and
they are pollinated, they'll develop fruit. Yes, a butternut squash
is a fruit. Botanically speaking, it's a berry. Yes, strawberries
are not berries. Butternut squash and bananas are. A butternut
(06:55):
will start out small, with a greenish-white striated skin, and
be kind of intrinsically cute-looking. It often resembles a slightly
weird peanut, like drawn by Pendleton Ward. the squash's skin
will deepen and brighten to a golden tan color of
the course of the summer as it grows and matures.
When you pick a butternut squash, you want to leave
(07:16):
a couple inches of stem on and then cure them
by keeping them in a warm, dry place for a
few days at least. After that, they should be stored
in a cool, dry-ish place. During all of this curing
and storing, butternuts will convert some of their starches into
sugars and develop a deeper orange flesh color. meaning they'll
(07:36):
become tastier and more chock-full of micronutrients, being that precursors
to vitamin A are responsible for those orangey pigments. Science
has shown that butternuts need a couple months in storage
to really develop post-harvest, and they'll keep for another few
months after that. Despite this, the squash's skin is very
(07:57):
thin and is edible. It's a little chewy or tough-ish
when cooked. which you might like for a contrast in texture,
or you might want to peel off to maintain smoothness
depending on your application. You scoop out the seeds and
their stringy webs before cooking. The seeds are also edible
and tasty when toasted. Farmers have developed a number of
(08:18):
sub-varieties of butternut, with differences in flavor, color, size, shape,
environmental preferences, time to harvest … and have given a
lot of them cutesy names like honey nut, brulee, and
nutter butter. The typical butternut squash will be around a
foot long and maybe half as wide and weigh about
two to four pounds. That's about 30 centimeters long and
(08:41):
weighing a kilo or two. But they can get much bigger.
The Guinness World Record for the heaviest butternut squash was
achieved in Germany in 2024. The squash in question weighed
137 pounds. That's 62 kilos. This is the sort of
category that frequently gets toppled, by the way. Sport squash growers, which, yes,
(09:06):
is a hobby that people take part in, employ all
kinds of tricks, like shaded tents and supportive hammocks, to
provide ideal big squash conditions. There wasn't a new winner
for heaviest butternut in 2025, though, and as of this recording,
it's a little early yet for word on 2026's champion squash.
(09:27):
We'll update you if there's an upset. Today's episode was
written by me, Lauren Vogelbaum. For more on the butternut squash,
check out the episode of my food podcast, Saver, called
Falling for Butternut Squash. BrainStuff is a production of iHeart
Podcasts in partnership with HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
(09:49):
For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, BrainStuff. Lauren
Vogelbaum here. It's officially fall here in the Northern Hemisphere,
which means some of us have visions of pumpkin spice
lattes dancing in our heads. Or maybe mugs of a
nice hearty squash soup. The latter is more my style,
(00:23):
but only because if I have too much sugar, someone's
going to have to deal with me. But whatever your preference,
weirdly enough, the same species of winter gourd is often
used to make both. And it's not the type of
pumpkin you're probably thinking of. Certainly, in the United States,
when we think of a pumpkin, we're usually thinking of
(00:44):
the large, sturdy gourds you can dig the seeds out
of and carve into a jack-o'-lantern. These are varieties of
the species Cucurbita peepo, which are known for having flesh
that's juicy and stringy. They're in the same wide species
as spaghetti squash and zucchini. The types of quote-unquote pumpkin
that get processed into the canned pumpkin you might buy
(01:07):
to make a pie or latte are generally of the
species Cucurbita muscata, which are known for having flesh that's
firmer and smoother. This is the species that gives us
calabazas and butternut squash. The specific variety grown for Libby
pumpkin pie filling in the U.S. is the Dickinson, which
is a large, pale-tan oblong type. People like to argue
(01:30):
about whether it should be properly called a squash or
a pumpkin. Some of those people work for the brand Libby. Anyway,
varieties or cultivars of both of these species vary widely
and were developed by humans specifically for those varying traits. C.
muscata contains a whole mess of mostly winter squashes, which
(01:52):
are types of squash harvested when they're fully mature, usually
in the fall. They have thicker skin and tend to
keep pretty well for a few months at room or
cellar temperature. This is opposed to summer squash, which are
harvested when they're still immature, in the summer. They're more
delicate and perishable, and will usually last a week or
two in the fridge. Today, let's talk about one of
(02:15):
those varieties of Sea Moscato winter squash, the aforementioned butternut squash.
This variety is fairly omnipresent today, and not just in
the United States. Of the global market for this squash,
which is worth well over a billion dollars a year,
about 55% comes from outside of the Americas entirely. If
(02:36):
you're the kind of person who enjoys looking up recipes
on the internet, you can find all sorts of different soups, stews,
and bakes incorporating butternuts from all over the world. But
although squashes in general have probably been part of human
diets for as long as there have been humans, butternut
squash was only developed less than a century ago on
(02:56):
farms outside of Boston. The Gourd family, Cucurbitaceae, arose in
what's now India some 63 million years ago and spread
out from there, jumping from Asia to Africa to South
America in a bunch of different distribution events. Maybe birds
ate their seeds and flew across Cretaceous-era oceans, or maybe
(03:19):
the sturdy hollow gourds themselves floated over open water. Maybe both,
a number of times. This eventually resulted in the genus Cucurbita,
which arose in South or Central America at least 9
million years ago. Later, humans there picked these plants up
and started domesticating them, selecting them for different desirable traits,
(03:41):
like sweetness or storage hardiness, pretty much as early as
humans were domesticating things. There's evidence that C. peepo was
domesticated there 10,000 years ago. That's when folks around the
Mediterranean were working on domesticating wheat. And looking at C.
muscata … In what's now the southeastern United States, remains
(04:01):
of sea moscata have been found in settlements dating back
to around 2000 to 1500 BCE. So we've been enjoying
these squash for a long time. Skipping ahead a few
millennia to the 1940s CE, the popular varieties of winter
squash grown in the northeastern United States were a little unwieldy.
(04:24):
You had the Blue Hubbard, which was a lot bigger
and heavier than most home cooks are used to wrangling today.
There were also curved neck squashes like the Gooseneck that
are very pretty, but longer and weirder and more difficult
to stack for shipping. So, a fellow by the name
of Charles Leggett from the town of Stowe, Massachusetts, decided
(04:44):
to do something about it. Although Leggett was a life
insurance agent by trade, the house he'd bought for his
family 30 miles west of Boston was came with about
90 acres of land. For our metric friends, that's about
36 hectares of land some 50 kilometers outside of Boston. Anyway,
Leggett took to experimenting in the garden in his free time.
(05:06):
One of his goals was to come up with a
squash that was smaller and easier to handle and prepare
than the varieties that were on the market. he wound
up bringing one of his developments to the nearby Waltham
Field Station, then a research facility in affiliation with the
Massachusetts College of Agriculture. There, a professor by the name
of Robert E. Young helped Leggett refine the variety into
(05:29):
what's now officially known as the Waltham Butternut Squash, so
named because it's as smooth as butter and sweet as
a nut. Within just a few years, it had already
started replacing local crops of the Blue Hubbard, And over
the next few decades, it made its way across the
country and the world. It's still a source of local pride, though.
(05:51):
At least part of Leggett's farmland was redeveloped in the
early 1990s as a golf course, joining other golf and
or country clubs in the area. And the new owners
named it the Butternut Farm Golf Club. But, okay. The
plant that butternut squash grow on is a type of
annual vine, meaning it needs to be replanted every year.
(06:13):
Those vines are thick and sort of bristly, and can
trail along the ground or be trained up a scaffold
of whatever kind. It'll produce broad, lobed leaves, and during
the early summer, will bloom with big, showy, bright yellow flowers.
The flowers are also edible, and if you happen to
grow your own butternut squash and have too many blossoms,
(06:34):
you can bread and fry them, maybe stuffed with some
nice goat cheese. But if you don't eat them and
they are pollinated, they'll develop fruit. Yes, a butternut squash
is a fruit. Botanically speaking, it's a berry. Yes, strawberries
are not berries. Butternut squash and bananas are. A butternut
(06:55):
will start out small, with a greenish-white striated skin, and
be kind of intrinsically cute-looking. It often resembles a slightly
weird peanut, like drawn by Pendleton Ward. the squash's skin
will deepen and brighten to a golden tan color of
the course of the summer as it grows and matures.
When you pick a butternut squash, you want to leave
(07:16):
a couple inches of stem on and then cure them
by keeping them in a warm, dry place for a
few days at least. After that, they should be stored
in a cool, dry-ish place. During all of this curing
and storing, butternuts will convert some of their starches into
sugars and develop a deeper orange flesh color. meaning they'll
(07:36):
become tastier and more chock-full of micronutrients, being that precursors
to vitamin A are responsible for those orangey pigments. Science
has shown that butternuts need a couple months in storage
to really develop post-harvest, and they'll keep for another few
months after that. Despite this, the squash's skin is very
(07:57):
thin and is edible. It's a little chewy or tough-ish
when cooked. which you might like for a contrast in texture,
or you might want to peel off to maintain smoothness
depending on your application. You scoop out the seeds and
their stringy webs before cooking. The seeds are also edible
and tasty when toasted. Farmers have developed a number of
(08:18):
sub-varieties of butternut, with differences in flavor, color, size, shape,
environmental preferences, time to harvest … and have given a
lot of them cutesy names like honey nut, brulee, and
nutter butter. The typical butternut squash will be around a
foot long and maybe half as wide and weigh about
two to four pounds. That's about 30 centimeters long and
(08:41):
weighing a kilo or two. But they can get much bigger.
The Guinness World Record for the heaviest butternut squash was
achieved in Germany in 2024. The squash in question weighed
137 pounds. That's 62 kilos. This is the sort of
category that frequently gets toppled, by the way. Sport squash growers, which, yes,
(09:06):
is a hobby that people take part in, employ all
kinds of tricks, like shaded tents and supportive hammocks, to
provide ideal big squash conditions. There wasn't a new winner
for heaviest butternut in 2025, though, and as of this recording,
it's a little early yet for word on 2026's champion squash.
(09:27):
We'll update you if there's an upset. Today's episode was
written by me, Lauren Vogelbaum. For more on the butternut squash,
check out the episode of my food podcast, Saver, called
Falling for Butternut Squash. BrainStuff is a production of iHeart
Podcasts in partnership with HowStuffWorks.com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
(09:49):
For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
BrainStuff News
Host
Lauren Vogelbaum
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