SC - blue laws

[marilyn traber]

At 6:47 PM -0400 5/27/98, llewmike at iwaynet.net wrote:

>Watermelons are African. Castelvetro mentions pumpkin sprouts in The
>Fruit, Herbs, and Vegetables of Italy. There are also some nice
>woodprints.  LLEW

When is Castelvetro writing, and can you tell what he means by pumpkin?
Pumpkins in our sense (round orange things) belong to the New World species
Cucurbita pepo; the earliest mention of the word in English in the Oxford
English Dictionary (in the form pompion) is 16th century, and I cannot tell
if it means our pumpkin or some other gourd.

I have seen 14th-c. Italian pictures of watermelons and what was translated
"pumpkins", but are actually white-flowered gourds, long and green. This
was in a manuscript of the Taciunum Sanitatas that was published a while
back as _The Four Seasons of the House of Cerruti_.

Elizabeth/Betty Cook


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