Honey Nut

Honeynut is the mini butternut that reset expectations for the whole class. Its ancestry traces to a buttercup (Cucurbita maxima) by butternut (C. moschata) cross made by Richard W. Robinson in the 1980s at Cornell's Geneva station; that line never reached market, but it passed to Molly Jahn and then to Michael Mazourek, who took it up in 2008 and — after a 2009 kitchen conversation with chef Dan Barber about how roasting concentrates squash flavour — selected hard for eating quality in a small fruit. It reached national US distribution through Row 7 Seed Company in 2016, and by 2017 roughly 90 percent of Northeast growers were reported to be growing it. Fruit is about half the size of a standard butternut at 4 to 5 inches long and 2.5 to 4 inches wide, carrying two to three times the beta-carotene. Mazourek also bred in a visible ripeness cue: the skin stays deep green through the eight-week fill and turns honey-orange only in the last couple of weeks.