SC - Thanks for the gourd info

[Seton1355@aol.com]

At 3:03 PM -0500 3/14/99, Seton1355 at aol.com wrote:
>I did not know, until after I made the meal, My Lord, and all I had was canned
>pumpkin anyway...BUT.....I wanted to try the soup again using a different
>squash so thank you for pointing me in the right direction!  But where do you
>get these gourds?  I've never heard of them.  Do they go by another name?
>Thank you,

The old world gourds are still used in Chinese cooking, and we have gotten
what we think are Lagenaria from chinese grocery stores. I say "think"
because we had a book on the history of Chinese cooking with an English
name and a latin name and a picture, and the people in the grocery store
had gourds and a Vietnamese name (and maybe a Chinese name--it was a while
ago), so we aren't sure we got the right thing.

One possibility, if you can talk to someone familiar with growing the
gourds, is to ask what color the flowers are. I think the "Italian edible
gourds" that one sometimes sees in seed catalogs are lagenereia too. What
you are looking for are edible gourds with white flours and  scientific
name Lagenaria sicereia. We have been told that one source for the seeds is
J.L. Hudson, Seedman (P.O.Box 1058, Redwood City, CA 94064).

The ones we found tasted more like zucchini than any of the other squashes,
so that might be a good substitution. On the other hand, most of the
familiar pumpkin/squash things are one species (Cucurbita pepo), which
demonstrates how wide a variation you can get with a single species; for
all I know there are Lagenaria equivalents of pumpkins etc.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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