What's the difference between a pie pumpkin and a jack-o'-lantern pumpkin?

Long before Linus was summarily chastised by Lucy for his involvement in the Great Pumpkin debable of " It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown ," the venerable pumpkin had a long and varied history.

The essentially inedible, toothless-grin-bearing, orange orb fruit that graces so many front stoops this time of year is a bit of a plant breeding anomaly. Unlike so many crops that have been bred, selected, and nutritionally improved over the millennia, the jack-o'-lantern pumpkin of Halloween fame seems to have been developed with the express purpose of camping out on the front steps, where it gradually turns into a steaming mass of pumpkin slime. Even the not-so-discriminating squirrels do little more than chew a hole in the shell to get to the seeds, which in most cases, have already been removed.

But honorable traditions endure.

The modern jack-o'-lantern pumpkin has a varied and interesting history that, if delivered with sufficient dinnertime panache, might even work to counter the tryptophan-laden turkey dinner on Thanksgiving.

With its genetic center of origin in central and northern South America, a handful of naturally occurring species have been farmed, bred, and subject to selection pressure to yield our present-day squash, gourds, and pumpkins. From the Halloween pumpkin to the acorn squash, zucchini, big Blue Hubbard, and so many others, they are prized for their diversity of flavor, tremendous storability, ease of cultivation, and their cultural importance.

Members of the taxonomic genus Cucurbita , the half dozen or so original species have been hybridized and selected over the last 10,000 or so years to yield an impressive diversity of varieties. In the coffers of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Plant Genetic Resources Unit (PGRU), there resides something on the order of 800+ genetic lines. And that’s just the USDA coffers.

But parsing down that immense group to what we generically refer to as pumpkins, there’s still a ton of variety. And they break down into several distinct categories:

What is a Jack-o'-lantern pumpkin?

The best I can tell, the modern jack-o'-lantern pumpkin has only been around for about 150 years and its arrival in the Americas seems to trace back to mid-19th century Irish immigrants who brought with them their tradition of carving faces in assorted starchy veggies. It seems when they arrived in North America, they decided the thinner-walled pumpkin was a much better option than carving into a solid turnip with a wobbly kitchen knife.

And over the ensuing decades, the carving pumpkin has gotten bigger, thinner-walled, and decidedly less edible. Today, it’s pretty much a carve, display, compost affair. Most recently, a chance cross between what was known as the Connecticut Field and Golden Oblong varieties gave rise to what we buy in the grocery store today.

What is a pie pumpkin?

This diverse group of varieties comes from the same species line as the modern jack-o'-lantern, Cucurbita pepo (which also, oddly, includes zucchini). But unlike the hard-shelled and almost tasteless Jack, pie pumpkins have tons of flavor. Whether you go with a Sugar Baby, Cinderella, Long Island Cheese, or one of the many other so-called sugar pumpkins, you’ll get a smaller, thicker-walled fruit with much more flavor. You’ll also get less of the stringiness that brings such joy to the cleaning out of a jack-o'-lantern’s innards.

What is canned pumpkin?

Don’t even get me started on the canned pumpkin pie filling thing. That’s just wrong in so many ways.

But you might be amused, if not interested, to know that some canned “pumpkin” is actually not pumpkin at all. Rather it is a variety of squash from the Cucurbita moschata species, more closely related to butternut squash than our jack-o'-lantern or even the true pie pumpkins.

Sure, by splitting Cucurbita hairs we’re being a bit pedantic here, but I guess if you take your Thanksgiving pumpkin pie even a little seriously, when else could you go so full-on pedantic about a cucurbit? Just think of how fast you’ll put everyone to sleep after Thanksgiving dinner. No tryptophan is required.

Paul Cappiello is the executive director at Yew Dell Botanical Gardens, 6220 Old Lagrange Road, yewdellgardens.org.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: What's the difference between a pie pumpkin and a jack-o'-lantern pumpkin?