Picked up a bottle of squash and got to wondering about the term “squash”, so I went digging around on the internet. Of course all the returns are squash (cucurbita) not squash the drink. Keep digging and more specificity and finally find out the obvious, “sqaush” is a concentrated fruit juice. No shit. Dig more and finally find out that it’s originally from a drink called “lemon squash”. Real helpful. So where does “lemon squash” come from? Who knows. There’s a curcubita called “lemon squash” that seems to be inescapable when searching for the origins of the drink.
So natives of where squash (drink) is common…how did it get it’s name? I await to be enlightened while sipping my Ribena.
Where are you and what the fuck is squash? All I know as a squash is a freakin gourd. Is this a weird British thing?
Edit: yea, it is a weird UK thing. Other places it’s called a cordial or dilute. Presumably it just comes from the literal meaning of squash, which in this context means to squeeze until you no longer have scurvy.
yeah… sorry
No, that shit is fascinating to me!
My wife and I have been watching Taskmaster and were asking other what a fucking satsuma is. Just a tangerine. (Okay, Mandarin. I’m never clear on which is which. Correction appreciated.)
No, it’s a mandarin.
Wanna have your mind blown more? Squash is more of a Britain thing. In Scotland and parts of Northern England, it’s known as diluting juice.
Scotland and Northern England not in Britain? Mind definitely blown.
Excuse me, what? I know what squash is because I lived in the UK for a while and I know what cordial is because I’m north american but what in the fuck they are the same thing?? I thought cordial was basically just syrup.
Looked around for squash = associated scurvy treatment, but couldn’t find anything. Got a reference for that?
I was making a joke about pirates and scurvy and vitamin c. The rest was as much as I could find for context. Lemon squash is about as far back as that etymology goes.
Scurvy is treated with Vitamin C, which is found in lots of fruit juices. The connection is obvious.
Canadians just call it “concentrate”
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TIL that squash is concentrated fruit juice. I had always imagined it was just some over sugared flavored junk.
Maybe it’s because you gotta squash the fruits to get the juice out? Or perhaps it rhymes with “slosh.”
We fell for this on my first trip to the UK. We went to the beach for a day and bought a bottle of “Robinsons”, and orange fruit squash, not knowing it was a concentrate (Yes, it is printed on the bottle, but we were in a hurry). When we poured it into our cups, we thought “Oh, a high quality juice, it is so thick”. Nope. So I had to find a shop that sold water for a reasonable price and carry that 2.5l bottle down to the beach again…
If it’s any consolation this was hilarious to imagine
From etymonline:
“to crush, squeeze,” early 14c., squachen, from Old French esquacher, variant of esquasser, escasser, escachier “to crush, shatter, destroy, break,” from Vulgar Latin *exquassare, from Latin ex “out” (see ex-) + quassare “to shatter” (see quash “to crush”).
Squash was originally a drink made from crushed fruit and must have turned into a concentrate somewhere down the line.
That doesn’t really help. I know what “squashing” something means. If simply squashing a fruit was the definition, then I’d like a source. However, one source said “squash” generic term came from a drink called “lemon squash”. Simply squashing a fruit doesn’t necessarily jive with a drink name.
E: y’all downvoters aren’t acting in the best interests of scientific process. Just because you feel squash=crush fruit=squash doesn’t mean it’s right, I’m looking for evidence, not just feels. You might be right, but I want proof.
I’m afraid prepared foods and drinks don’t always have the sort of etymological provenance you seem to be seeking. When was the verb squash first used as a noun to denote a drink? A quick search of Google Books shows the earliest literature mentioning squash is The Adventures of Cooroo, a Native of the Pellew Islands from 1805. From a glance it appears to be known as an alcoholic drink at the time, and is mentioned without explanation so it was part of the popular lexicon and could have been used for years before that.
From there it morphed into your aforementioned “lemon squash” in the late 1800s, which seemed to be a nonalcoholic drink made from crushed lemons and soda water. By at least 1897 recipes for squash mentioned “essences” of lime- and lemon- squash so it is easy to see that transitioning to the sweet flavored syrup by 1938 when Ribena first produced your Blackcurrant Squash.
It becomes even more murky when you search for cordial, which appears much earlier and also denoting an alcoholic drink(Although cordial seems to have first had a more medical use).
Thank you. That’s probably the best “as close as we can get” answer without actually getting an answer.
Might be one for /askhistorians on Reddit.
If you are going to pose the question to a more academic circle I’d advise specificity. “When was the word ‘squash’ first used to denote a beverage?” is a good question, or even “How did squash turn from an alcoholic drink to the nonalcoholic drink base we know of today?”; My uneducated guess is the temperance movement may have had a hand in that.
All good points. Thank you.
pub squash is a thing in Australia, just lemon squash