[Sca-cooks] Gourds, pumpkins was 2002 Cook's Symposium

[Sue Clemenger]

Naw...what she did (IMNSHO) is use a period recipe as an excuse for a
modern pumpkin pie....the two dishes had a few ingredients in common,
and that's about it.
Some of her others are actually worse...lord, what she did to a
cheesecake-type thing (with cherries and rose petals baked into it).
Ugh.
The whole cookbook's rather an interesting study in mid-20th c. food and
food preferences.
Of course, it's very easy to *not* see things that might be really
obvious to others...things like redactions that call for browning meat
or poultry, because that's a common step in modern, similar recipes,
even when it doesn't occur in the originals, or redactions that leave
out all kinds of spices--sometimes fairly important ones for the
recipe--just because the redactor doesn't like them.
--maire

johnna holloway wrote:
>
> Actually it's not that simple. There are recipes that call for pumpkins
> prior to the discovery of the new world squash. The translation of
> pumpkin has commonly been used for curcurbitas, says Harvey in Mediaeval
> Gardens. What the Pepperidge Farm cookbook did was use the new world
> pumpkin and jump into a 15th century recipe calling for a what would
> have been probably a bottle gourd that was translated as "pumpkin".
> Milham translates it as "Gourd Pie" in her rendition.
>
> Of course in the late 16th century when a recipe appears in the Epulario
> calling for gourds or pompeons, one might very well use the North
> American pumpkins.
>
> Johnna Holloway  Johnnae llyn Lewis
>
> Sue Clemenger wrote:
>  Nice idea,
> > bad scholarship?
> > (Reminds me of the really-bad 1950s redactions of some period recipes
> > that I've got in an old Pepperidge Farm cookbook....She takes a recipe
> > for some sort of gourd tart [I'm guessing bottle gourds? She uses the
> > word "pumpkin"--no original recipe provided, just some sort of
> > translation] made of cooked, sieved gourd, rich fat, cheese, sugar,
> > eggs, milk, saffron and cinnamon, and turns it into a modern pumpkin
> > pie. Now, the pumpkin pie looks perfectly nice, but it bears only a
> > passing resemblance to the original inspiration!)
> > --maire
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