My Immortal Butternut
a very undead squash, and where we go from here
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Immortality.
Longevity.
Forever.
These are words we tend to identify with certain things. The Holy Grail. Korean twelve-step beauty routines. Love. The amount of time between 2 PM and when you actually get off work on a rainy Tuesday.
But they’re not really the type of words you think of right off the bat when it comes to vegetables.
Here is a confession: I have a butternut squash in residence on top of my breadbox. This feels like a shameful thing. Why shameful? It’s butternut squash season after all. The appropriate time of year for buying a chonky winter squash and concocting a soup, galette, or a cheesy gratin. It’s not uncommon to see a lot of home cooks buying a squash and giving it a place of distinction on the countertop till starring in a dinnertime one-act. They’re seasonal produce, and decorative while they last. And anyway, let’s not forget that pumpkins - the entire reason some people participate in fall - are also squashes.
I always try to use a lot of squash each fall-winter season because they seem kind of aspirational, like something only Serious Food People bother to cook for themselves. And this greed, this posing, is my downfall. Because now we are standing firmly in the middle of September, and guilt gnaws at my ribcage. Let me ask: what would you consider the appropriate length of time to keep a butternut squash on one’s countertop? If your answer is “a month or two?” then you have added to my shame.
At markets and farm stands this season’s hopeful-faced squashes wait to be selected for the role of Rachel’s Annual Gourd. And believe me, I want to buy them. I want to heft a butternut or an acorn squash, or even a cute little patty-pan squash in my hand and look like someone who knows how to cook for vegetarians and recycles coffee grounds.
But I? I have had the self-same butternut squash on top of my breadbox since November. Yes, I bought one (1) butternut squash in 2021 and never cooked it. And then I forgot. And now it’s September. And I don’t know how many of you have done the math, but it’s nearly eleven months old, that squash. A truly shocking old age. On a trajectory to match the 176 years of Harriet, Darwin’s tortoise, I should think.
How did it (the squash, not the tortoise) come to be so old? I can’t properly say - I guess at some point it became a fixture in my kitchen as it sat on my bread box and propped up my phone during Facetimes to my sister in NYC. She probably told me about the latest guys she was dating while I chopped onions or drizzled olive oil, and the squash was there each time, listening and propping, and being sturdy and impassive. It witnessed the workmen tearing down our living room ceiling after the Leaky Pipe Incident, and got a little covered in plaster dust. Sometimes it hangs with a bunch of organic bananas which turn brown and speckly, just in time for me to freeze them. Bananas come and go, but squash, it seems, is eternal.
Some time around May, well past soup season, I finally noticed that the squash was not another appliance like my red Kitchenaid stand mixer, or Andrew’s Keurig. I’m not known for noticing trivial things around the house, but even I was stricken by a sudden realization that this was something that should have expired by now.
“Geez, you’re old.” I inspected it. No visible distress. “I should probably use you pretty soon.”
That was May.
This is four months later. The most disconcerting part is how relatively intact my butternut squash still looks. I mean, if the thing was clearly rotten, or feeling like an empty pea-pod, if it was wrinkled at all or looked anything other than tanned and sanguine, I would toss it out just like that. But each time I give this squash a once-over, it looks pretty much perfect. Surely I’ll use it this week, just need to work it into the meal plans. I meant next week...or the week after that...
In my defense, the entire term “winter squash” does not refer to the season of growth at all but to the fact that these types of vegetables store quite well for some length of time, unlike summer squashes like zucchini. This is mostly on account of how the skin thickens right before harvest time, giving the squash an innate difficulty to being wounded by a few thumps and bumps and nicks. The thick skin protects the squash and preserves it, making them ideal for storing in root cellars, if any of you have a root cellar, which I certainly don’t.
A proclivity for long life aside, however, there seems to be a general consensus that the life expectancy of a fresh butternut squash is somewhere in the range of two to three months. And that is if you were to keep the squash somewhere dim and around fifty-nine degrees.
I don’t know what to tell you.
This squash has lived for eleven months on my sort-of-shady counter, in a kitchen that usually registers around seventy, sometimes warmer when the stove and oven are blasting, sometimes cooler when the winter chill seeps in through the big bay window at front. According to all Google-able results, this squash should not exist. But it does.
I’ve taken all my misgivings to the internet. According to all the experts, these are the visible signs of rot that should alert one to the Impending Badness of an Old Squash:
Squishy spots (logical)
“Sores” (ew)
Mold (to be expected)
Feeling light and husk-ish (no such trouble)
Having a wobbly stem (excuse me?)
According to this thorough checklist (which sounds like an impending STD, to be honest), my squash is in fine condition; not a single sign of aging. Of course, there is a chance that it has rotted from inside and I won’t find out until I cut into it. I pushed on its sides and base last night to check. The skin might have had a little give to it, or it might have been my imagination; the way I always think a tooth is loose when I randomly push on one with my fingertip, because I’ve had such lifelong bad experiences with dentists as a category.
Whenever I ask anybody if they think I ought to cut into the squash at this point, the answers vary: some people are shocked and appalled at the fact I didn’t throw that squash away nine months ago. Others are interested in the science experiment of seeing just how much longer it could last. Personally, I’m getting antsy. The temperature outside occasionally drops below eighty. I had an un-ironic thought about wearing a sweater this morning before laughing at my own naivete and wearing a tank-top. The status-symbol pumpkins (the big, Cinderella white ones and warty little creamsicle ones and the ones that look like butternut squash except pumpkin-shaped) are out for sale. I feel like it’s time to make something of this vegetable I’ve known for almost a year.
I want to chop open my squash and dice it into neat little orange cubes to be sauteed with onion and celery and simmered in chicken broth before getting blended into a velvety liquid and finished with a dash of cream. Then I want to scatter bits of sizzled prosciutto and some chili crisp overtop and eat it with sourdough toast points and an arugula salad. And yet...should I let this specimen live even longer and gain further infamy? If I cook it, is it even advisable to eat?
Enter the Explorer’s Club dinner of 1951. Its illustrious members were allegedly served mammoth meat or an ancient species of extinct giant sloth, depending on who you asked at the time. Legend has it that explorers had found meat frozen to the prehistoric bones/carcass of an unearthed mammoth in Alaska and - thinking it safe enough to eat since it had been frozen so many years without a thaw - had brought it home to be served as part of the annual dinner where other super strange things were de rigueur. The New York Times has an excellent nerdy article about the DNA testing they’ve done of the one serving of meat left from that infamous dinner. What exactly did the explorers eat in 1951? I won’t spoil it for you - the truth is a humorous, serpentine thing.
But it got me thinking. What would you do when faced with the prospect of eating meat from a creature that had been dead and (potentially) pre-rotted for thousands and thousands of years? Would you partake? It seems kind of horrifying...yet equally horrifying to me is the prospect of missing out on being one of the minute group of people to have ever savaged a bowl of mammoth stew. Still yet...what if after the jolly time at the Explorer’s Club, we all got some paleontological parasite for which no modern cure exists, and suddenly an anaconda-sized tapeworm started jostling around inside the belly looking for more mammoth to devour?
I’m just saying, compared to dinners at The Explorer’s Club, eating soup made from an eleven month old butternut squash seems pretty tame.
I think I’ll leave the butternut squash alone for another month. I want to see if it can pass its approximate birthday. If we make it to Halloween and this squash is not a pile of slime, then and only then will I cut it open and see what’s been going on this whole time behind that illegible expression. I need to know if it made it a whole year, and in what condition. Surely you’re curious too?
But mostly I need to know: if all signs point to it still being good...would you dare eat a bowl of butternut squash soup with me? You know I’ll be hazarding my fortunes. Come on…it could be fun.