squash blossoms don’t have to be bougie

Like fashion, food trends go in and out of vogue, and often food trends of high end restaurants are appropriated from the lifestyles of poor people and repackaged as novel ideas. Lobsters were once so repulsive to Europeans in the US that they were only served in prisons far away from the coast.

Dandelions have been a staple for southern Black families for generations, and now can be found in mass produced salad mixes, bougie teas, and craft wines. Squash blossoms have a similar story.

Today, these flowers from the big vining plants of pumpkins, zucchinis, butternut, etc can be sold for as much as the squashes themselves at a farmer’s market, or as a stuffed and fried entree at bougie restaurants. They are invisible to the common supermarket because they are fragile and spoil in just a few days. But for the person who grows squashes, they are almost frustratingly abundant.

As we have collectively gotten farther away from (or have been forcibly removed from) farming, we’ve lost this connection to the plant. What is trash for the person waiting patiently for their acorn squash to develop becomes treasure to the farm to table restaurant that can sell the flowers to unwitting customers.

To harvest squash blossoms, you harvest only the male flowers. The actual pumpkin or squash comes from the female flower of a female plant. If you have ever grown a pumpkin that grew huge and vibrant, produced tons of flowers but zero fruit, it was likely a male. And if you depended on that plant for food, you would definitely be sautéing up dozens of those flowers, adding them to salads, or stuffing and frying them yourself - an abundance of food. They fall off by themselves and, while they are great for the bees, harvesting them periodically for lunch doesn’t harm the plant.

Female plants have male flowers too. The difference can be seen at the base of the flower - you can see a little tiny squash forming at the base of the female flower, while the male is connected straight to the vine. Leave the female flowers to make fruit, and leave just a few male flowers to help pollinate, and harvest up the rest before they wilt and rot on the plant.

So if frost hasn’t killed the last winter squash plants, harvest all the squash blossoms you can and serve them up. Great cooked with garlic and oil and tossed with pasta, or eaten raw in a salad.

Written by Steven Casanova, RFJA Historiologist
Photos by Alex Matzke