The Mysterious Squash

What is round like a small pumpkin, and beige like a butternut squash?

This slightly mysterious (well, as mysterious as a squash can be) squash was in our CSA batch of vegetables this week. The dry-erase board informed us that we could choose one winter squash, between two varieties: butternut or pharsi. Yes, that’s how it was written. I asked our CSA leader what pharsi squash was.

"Well," she said, "it’s pretty cool, actually. Farmer Bill told me when he came today that he spent some time in Nepal, and he brought back these seeds with him. He called it pharsi because he found it in Nepal."

Beat.

"Um," said I, "isn’t Farsi spoken in Iran, not Nepal?" My brain floundered wildly for a link and came up empty handed (mixed metaphor intended). Dunno, she said, that’s all the information she had.

Well, whatever the little beige ball was, it certainly seemed to have an interesting provenance, so I chose a nice one over the equally nice looking, but now somewhat plebeian, butternut squash.

This evening after dinner, I turned to my old friend Google (who turned 7 today, I think. What is that in people years?) Googled Nepal squash, and got quite a bit of information on Nepalese Racquetball. Tried removing the word racquet, which helped a little, but not much. On to various searches using squash, winter squash, Asian winter squash, etc. I finally decided to try pharsi squash. Of course, it asked me if I meant Farsi, but I assured it I did not. And wouldn’t you know – the first two results contained just the information I was looking for, never mind that I think they are the only two results on the entire Internet containing the information I was looking for. Two is enough, and now I can eat my pharsi with my mind at ease, so long as it's either jeth or asoj.

Ethnobotanical Notes on Thangmi* Plant Names (PDF)

phatu (I can’t reproduce the little dot under the t)
Nepali pharsi
pumpkin, summer or winter squash, marrow,
Cucurbita maxima; Cucurbita pepo
The leaves are collected as fodder for domesticated animals, but are also eaten by humans as a vegetable curry. The large fruit is also made into vegetable curry when it ripens between the months of jeth and asoj, and the dried seeds are eaten as a peanut-like snack. The fruit is believed to contain agents which help fight jaundice when eaten raw.

*Thangmi is the name of a language spoken by a small ethnic group in eastern Nepal called the Th­ami (with little lines over the a and i like straight tildes).