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.
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.