[Sca-cooks] new world foods; old world names

[Terry Decker]

BTW, watermelons are of African origin and have been known in Europe since 
Antiquity.  The smaller round and elongated varieties are probably closer to 
the base stock.

You also appear to be confusing the general definition of berry, a small 
juicy fleshed fruit of any botanical description, with the botanical 
definition of a berry, an indehiscent fruit derived from a single ovary 
having the whole wall flesh, grapes and tomatoes make that cut too.

I would recommend, reading the appropriate entries in the 2-vol. Cambridge 
World History of Food.  It's expensive, so go through the library.  McGee's 
On Food and Cooking might be useful in this endeavor.  The pertinent 
sections of Pliny's Natural Histories is also useful in understanding what 
people actually knew about their foodstuffs.

In period pepper is used as a general word for hot spices and as a specific 
word for members of genus Piper.  Black pepper or white pepper (Piper 
nigrum), long pepper (Piper longnum),  cubebs (Piper cubeba), betel peppper 
(Piper betle, whose leaves are used to wrap betel nuts, Areca catechu) and 
kava (Piper methysticum) are all things that might be referred to as pepper, 
although the first three would have been more likely to reach the spicer.

IIRC, the transference of the name pepper to the New World Capsicums occurs 
in Columbus's journal of his first voyage to the New World where he relates 
an undetermined capsicum pepper (possibly a Scotch bonnet) to genus Piper 
and notes that he can ship something like 89 caravelles of the peppers to 
Spain each year.  He also relates maize to millet and sweet potatoes to 
yams.

Remember that most of the discoverers were not trained botanists and most 
had no scientists on their expeditions.  They either used variants of the 
native names or used the name of something the new foodstuff closely 
resembled.

Artichokes are an open question.  Clifford Wright makes a case for 
artichokes not being known until very late and that the plant being 
referenced is the cardoon.  Other sources are more liberal in their 
consideration of the artichoke within the SCA period.  Wright has a bad 
tendency to avoid information that conflicts with his views, but he is one 
of the few people to make a serious and systematic study.  Personally, I 
side with the more liberal view and would be willing to include artichokes 
in a feast, but I also recognize the possibility my views are in error.

As for pumpkins, gourds come in a wide variety of colors.  It is quite 
possible that the gourds originally referred to a pumpkins may have been 
orange and that C. pepo was similar enough to fill the bill.  Pompion, the 
anscestoral form of pumpkin derives from the Greek via the Latin pepon and 
is translated as referring to a large ripe melon.

Bear


<clipped>
> ok, you get the idea. So here's the question:
> Peppers and watermelon and pumpkin/gourds. Can anyone recommend some 
> sources
> that I can pass on to him and use myself? And whose idea was it to use
> established food names for newly discovered foods?
>
> :)
> Elisabetta