SC - Pumpkins/gourds (Was: gingered butternut squash soup)

[david friedman]

Cariadoc said:
>> 1. I'm pretty sure C. Moschata is New World.
>>
>> 2. Isn't bottle gourd Lageneria sicereia (sp?).
>>
and Bear replied:

>The Langenaria used to be the Old World gourds and the Cucurbita were
>primarily New World squashes, so you are probably correct.  There have been
>some changes in taxonomy, but I haven't been able to tell if they are
>commonly accepted or under debate.  Several sources commented on differences
>in taxonomy, but provided little specific information.  The source I was
>quoting places C. moschata in Africa, Asia, and both North and South America
>and places the bottle gourd in C. moschata.  It appears to be thorough,
>authoritative and accurate, however it may represent a particular academic
>heresy or I may have misread the information.
>
>I'm interested in determining a chronology for the variants of the species
>of Cucurbita, so I will be looking at this further.
>
>Bear

About ten years ago I dug into the botanical literature looking for what
gourds, squash, pumpkin, etc would have been used in period.  I had a
picture from a pre-Columbus _Taciunum Sanitatas_ of
some that are green-skinned and shaped somewhere between butternut and
zucchini (i.e. long with some swelling toward the bottom end), and the
plants have white flowers.  I found, among others, the following article:
Whitaker, Thomas W., "American Origin of the Cultivated Cucurbits," Annals
of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 1947.

His conclusion, on a variety of evidence ranging from what seeds and rinds
have been found in what ancient garbage dumps to what the 15th and 16th
century herbals show, is that all or almost all squash you find in the
grocery belong to one of three New World species of the genus Cucurbita
(there is one Old World species of that genus, but it isn't cultivated).
Cucurbita pepo includes zucchini, the standard orange pumpkin, yellow
summer squash, (I think) acorn squash, and various others.  Cucurbita
moschata includes butternut and some others I don't remember.  Cucurbita
maxima includes Hubbard squash and some others that get really big.  He
didn't really go into the question of what Europeans ate before the New
World squashes come in, but he did mention the White-Flowered Gourd,
Lagenaria sicereia, as something that people have eaten. (At least some,
and maybe all, of the New World species have yellow flowers.)

A few years later we came across the book _Food in China_ by Frederick J.
Simoons, CRC Press, Boca Raton 1991. He listed Lagenaria sicereia (calling
it the bottle gourd) as still eaten in China, and had a line drawing
consistant with the _Taciunum Sanitatas_ picture mentioned above.  So armed
with his book, we visited Chinatown.  We had a Latin name and an English
name and a picture and the people in the store had a Chinese name and a
Vietnamese name, so I won't swear we got the right thing, but we took it
home and tried it in some of Platina's recipes.  The taste was probably
closer to zucchini than any other common squash I know, but not as bitter.
We have found the same thing since sold by Chinese or Vietnamese merchants;
the name at least one of them gave it is "opo" and he told us it had white
flowers.  I have also seen white-flowered gourd grown in a Farm Park near
Cleveland, though I didn't get to taste those.

One of the neat things about the SCA is the chance to do research on
thoroughly off-the-wall topics.

Elizabeth of Dendermonde/Betty Cook


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