A sweet heirloom with a unique Puget Sound heritage
BY LUCY NORRIS
PHOTO BY LARA FERRONI
With the arrival of fall, many of us start to crave the taste of winter squash. It usually coincides with a strong desire for hot apple cider and braised pork. Pumpkin, Butternut, and Acorn are popular varieties of winter squash and are available in grocery stores year-round, but the very name indicates a seasonal vegetable best eaten in the fall and winter. For recipe usage, winter squash varieties are interchangeable. It’s good baked, pureed, and added to everything from soups to entrees to pies. People with a sweet tooth love it because it satisfies sugar cravings without added sugar, and it’s packed with vitamins. It’s like dessert for dinner, only healthier.
Less popular is the blue Hubbard squash. It began to appear in New England in the eighteenth century. Tear-shaped, ridged, battleship grey and weighing up to 50 pounds, it’s dry, starchy and sweet with bright orange flesh. A handsaw is required to cut through the peel of this tough old Yankee—and handsaws aren’t standard kitchen equipment these days, so other than an occasional appearance in holiday decorations, the Hubbard isn’t found in modern produce departments. But chances are, you’ve eaten Hubbard squash every year since you first tasted “pumpkin” pie: most canned pumpkin is actually this plain blue beast.
In the last decade, cooks and home gardeners have rallied around heirloom vegetable and fruits, resulting in a broad new interest in old standbys. The Territorial Seed Company catalog features at least six varieties of the lowly Hubbard, including the rare Sugar Hubbard. It turns out that the Sugar Hubbard is a pretty special squash. Dale and Liz Sherman’s Pioneer Farm Produce in central Whidbey Island grows the only commercial crop of Sugar Hubbard in the country.
The Sugar Hubbard is the result of combining traditional blue Hubbard and Sweetmeat squash. It inherited the best flavor and texture characteristics of both: a moist flesh that is slightly easier to cut than a blue Hubbard. It also stores longer than Sweetmeat squash, a considerable asset for grocery retailers. It can’t be beat when it comes to nutrients. Yes, the Sugar Hubbard is a starchy squash (with a high glycemic index), but it’s very high in vitamin A, exceeding USDA requirements for beta carotene.
According to Territorial Seed, which is the only seed company selling any strain of Sugar Hubbard squash seed commercially, the squash was developed by the Gill Brothers Seed Company in Portland, Oregon. The Shermans say that Gill Brothers might have been involved in the development of first Sugar Hubbard seed, but it was Edwin Sherman, Dale’s father, along and Washington State University, whose research collaboration further developed the seed stock and kept the strain in existence.
About a decade ago, Territorial Seed Company purchased seed stock from the Shermans and credited Edwin Sherman for keeping the strain alive. According to Liz and Dale, Territorial now maintains and markets their Sugar Hubbard seed strain. Territorial catalog’s description changed a few years back, now crediting Gill Brothers as sole creators of what they sell. The Shermans haven’t sold seeds to Territorial Seed Company for years, but rather maintain their own heritage strain.
The Sugar Hubbbard has an excellent flavor, and it’s uniquely local to Puget Sound, with a strong family heritage. It has every asset required for boarding onto Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, an international catalog of foods that are threatened by large-scale agricultural standards. Boarding a product on the Ark of Taste sends a signal to conscientious consumers and helps boost market demand. Only the best tasting endangered foods make it onto the Ark, and I was convinced of the Sugar Hubbard’s value at first bite.
It was Edwin Sherman who planted the first Sugar Hubbard crops on Whidbey Island during the Great Depression. “Dale’s father had a few beef cows and grew some wheat,” Liz explained. “The reason he grew wheat was because it was feed for their cousin’s turkeys. The wheat straw was used for squash storage.” Neighboring farms used to grow some squash on Whidbey but over time, they moved onto different crops or sold their farms altogether. Edwin Sherman built buildings to keep the squash through the winter including a customized storage system combining straw and a ventilation framework to hold the annual harvest. Each Sugar Hubbard weighs about twenty pounds each. Two or three box trucks can park inside one storage building.
The Shermans’ farm history is a genealogical page-turner. The farm site can be traced back to Charles Terry, who purchased the property from TS Davis Land Donation Claims (as a result of the 1850 passage of the Donation Claims Act, a factor that accelerated white settlement of Puget Sound). Charles Terry was a big deal because he was a member of the Denny Party, who first settled in what is now downtown Seattle. A man named Ben Tufts married Charles’ daughter Edie and acquired the farm in Coupeville. By the 1950s, the Tufts were no longer able to maintain the farm. That’s when Edwin Sherman purchased the farm from them. It is noteworthy because Mr. Sherman continued to care for the couple until their deaths.
Dale and Liz now live in the house that Ben Tufts built for his bride, and they also inherited Ben and Edie’s original love letters. Now they live surrounded by fields of squash, including the Sugar Hubbard, which his own father first developed and planted on their farm.
Despite setbacks in the last ten years, Dale Sherman is committed to carrying on the family’s Sugar Hubbard tradition on the very land his father farmed, and the Tufts and Terrys before them. Dale’s son would also like to carry on the tradition but since they lost their largest, longstanding retail customer, there isn’t the income from the Sugar Hubbard to support two families.
It was that last big customer who required the Shermans to invest in building an onsite, licensed WSDA processing facility in order to cut and package their squash. Processed and packaged produce is known as “value-added” in the industry, meaning that owning and controlling the processing would be a way to increase revenue on otherwise inexpensive raw produce. The farm stood to earn more money per pound than selling only whole unprocessed squash, and selling cubed squash could entice more home or restaurant cooks to use it. Investing in an onsite processing facility seemed like a natural step for the Shermans, allowing them to control every single aspect of the Sugar Hubbard’s production, including saving seeds, planting, monitoring, harvesting, storage, cutting, wrapping and marketing the only Sugar Hubbard crop in existence.
Farming has always been a risky business, especially when a family’s income is dependent on seasonal squash and pumpkins. Only two large commercial buyers purchase whole Butternut squash from the Shermans, and neither purchases the Sugar Hubbard. Based on what Dale and Liz know about food trends, there is certainly a market for the Sugar Hubbard. And they’re right: what’s not to love about a locally grown, minimally processed heirloom variety that’s tasty and off the charts in beta carotene? By eating it, we can help ensure the Sugar Hubbard remains in production on the Shermans’ farm, and on our plates for many holiday seasons to come.
Find the Squash
Peeled squash cubes and larger unpeeled squash sections are available at all Whole Foods locations in Oregon and Washington as long as the supply holds out.
Liz and Dale continue to look for additional retailers for their squash. Sherman’s Pioneer Farm Produce is located at 46 South Ebey Road, Coupeville, WA. Contact Liz or Dale Sherman at
360.678.4675.
Looking for recipes? Try our Sugar Hubbard Spice Loaf or Sugar Hubbard Chili Stew for sweet and savory inspirations.
Lucy Norris is Project Manager for Puget Sound Food Network, a project of the Northwest Agriculture Business Center, former co-chair of Slow Food Seattle, and author of Pickled: Preserving a World of Tastes and Traditions.