The bloom is still on

FROM all over the globe they come to Los Angeles, unknown or overlooked at home and hoping to make it big. And so it was for the zucchini. But while it seems that almost everyone else who has come to Southern California and wound up famous has been memorialized by a statue, a star in the sidewalk or even been elected governor, nowhere is there a monument to the zucchini and the region's role in its meteoric rise to fame.

Yet it's safe to say that without us Southern Californians -- enthusiastic food adventurers even in the 1920s -- zucchini, one of the most popular vegetables in the world, might be nothing more than just another obscure summer squash.

Today zucchini is so ubiquitous it's like vegetable wallpaper -- seen everywhere but noticed never. That's true in this country, where it is so plentiful it has become the butt of jokes, and even globally, where one squash expert says there is probably as much zucchini harvested around the world as all other members of the squash family put together.

Though it seems impossible to imagine today, 100 years ago zucchini was a brand-new vegetable. According to Harry S. Paris, the preeminent squash historian, the first recorded mention of a squash from the zucchini family was a regional Milanese variety in 1901 in an Italian seed pamphlet.

The records are foggy -- at the turn of the century no one seems to have deemed the introduction of a new squash much worth writing about -- but the best evidence shows that zucchini was brought to the United States by Italian immigrants around World War I.

And despite the fact that the first academic reference to zucchini in this country didn't come until 1937, in Southern California it was well-known much earlier than that, thanks to a local seed supplier and a couple of downtown Los Angeles restaurants.

Throughout the 1920s, according to The Times archives, Southern Californians were slicing, sauteing, frying and stuffing zucchini with happy abandon.

Paris, who got his start helping his dad grow melons in his backyard in Brooklyn, is now a senior research scientist at Newe Ya'ar Research Center in Israel, specializing in the breeding, cultivation, history and genetics of squashes. He says the first zucchini was probably a spontaneously occurring genetic mutation that was recognized by its grower as having better flavor, color and shape than its parents and so its seeds were saved and replanted.

Historic seed catalog