SC - Pumpkins and such...
Christine A Seelye-King
mermayde at juno.com
Wed Oct 18 22:46:54 PDT 2000
Welcome, and with 2 cents like those, you can pitch in anytime!
Mistress Christianna MacGrain, OP, OL, Meridies
On Thu, 19 Oct 2000 01:30:15 EDT LadyEbonSwan at aol.com writes:
> In a message dated 10/18/00 5:07:16 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> TerryD at Health.State.OK.US writes:
>
> << Pumpkins and squash come into use in Europe during the 16th
> Century and
> they
> appear in very late SCA period paintings. The paintings I've seen
> suggest
> they were eaten, but they don't seem to make an appearance in the
> recipes
> (they may have simply replaced the gourds in cooking).
>
> As a piece of guesswork, the giant varietals are modern hybrids,
> while the
> smaller pumpkins, like the Small Sugar, would be closer to the 16th
> Century
> pumpkin.
> >>
>
> If I might put in my two cents' worth here....
>
> I've been lurking for about a week or perhaps more; finally I
> found a
> topic I can jump in on, more or less. But first, a wee
> introduction....
>
> My name is Siobhan MacDermott; I've been playing off and on in
> the Barony
> of St.Swithun's Bog, Kingdom of Aethelmearc for almost nine years
> now...(wow...I hadn't thought till now that it was that long!) I
> haven't been
> very active in a while; two babies in as many years kind of nipped
> that in
> the bud for a time! I'm also a living historian (snotty way to say
> re-enactor) with a Civil War unit, which took up what little time I
> had left.
> With both of these persuits, I've become the cook by default, for
> love of my
> playing with period recipes and chasing people down to try them,
> with mixed
> results. Y'know, if you trip 'em, they sit still long enough to
> shove a
> pasty or two in their mouths....
>
> At any rate, I've worked with a lot of recipes with pumpkin, and
> in my
> circles as well, the origins of pumpkins and squash have been
> bandied about.
> The results of my research (which I'm praying isn't the notebook I
> saw my
> toddler disappear with a few days ago) was that:
>
> Pumpkins and most types of "winter" squash (acorn, hubbard,
> pumpkins and
> the like) are indeed products of the New World, and therefore would
> not be
> appropriate for anything but extreme late period (SCA) dishes. I
> did,
> however find a most tantalizing hint as to just how far back the
> said
> squashes were used in European/Colonial cooking in a little book by
> the title
> of "New England Rarities", by Josselyn [1671]. An example (quoted
> from yet
> another notebook from Lord knows what feast I was considering
> throwing
> together)....
>
> Pompion Sause
>
> The Housewives manner is to slice them when ripe and cut them
> into Dice,
> and so fill a pot with them of two or theree Gallons and stew them
> upon a
> gentle fire the whole day. And as they sink they fill again with
> fresh
> Pompions not putting any liquor to them and when it is stir'd enough
> it will
> look like bak'd Apples, this Dish putting butter to it and a little
> Vinegar
> with some Spice as Ginger which makes it tart like an Apple, and so
> serve it
> up to be eaten with fish or flesh.
>
>
> ...what I found to be really interesting was that his comment
> about this
> dish was that this was "that ancient New England standing dish". I
> don't
> expect it to be much more than a few decades older than this
> publication, but
> it did give me a stepping stone in my research. Another interesting
> note is
> that while I was living in France while in high school (exchange
> program and
> all), I stayed in Provence, near Marseilles. Stewed pumpkin is a
> very common
> side dish there, and apparently has been (at least according to my
> host
> mother and her mother, who were Belgian) for longer than they can
> remember.
> Huh. Just try serving that to your kids here..::chuckle::
>
> And another side note...a lot of the solid pack pumpkin in cans
> and the
> pie filling found in stores are not only mostly squash of varying
> varieties
> (they all taste somewhat alike when similarly prepared), but are
> also colored
> with an extract from carrots. When making pies from scratch, the
> resulting
> color is a gray-ish color. Tastes wonderful, though.
>
> Anyway....there's my two cents!
>
> Siobhan MacDermott
>
>
>
>
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