[Sca-cooks] Squash in Scappi's Opera

[Johnna Holloway]

To start, Mistress Helewyse has a paper that details
new world vegetables in 16th century Italian cookery and cookbooks.

A time for change: new world foods in old world menus
Taught at Pennsic 35 by Mistress Helewyse de Birkestad,
The paper is online on her website under classes.
http://www.geocities.com/helewyse/#Classes

(BTW, Mistress Helewyse is cooking an Italian Feast tomorrow. Menu is
posted here- http://www.catteden.com/pouncefeast&food.html  )

Another way to look at the question of squashes and gourds is through  
art.

Through the years we've played the 'id that fruit or vegie game in  
this painting' a number of times
and I've tried to save those posts.

Here are some sites we've uncovered that provide images of squashes or  
gourds.

http://www.agriculture.purdue.edu/agricultures/past/fall2008/Features/Feature%205.html

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/caravaggio/caravaggio_l.html

Early Evidence for the Culinary Use of Squash Flowers in Italy
http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:LfO8qEW9hm0J:www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/squashflowers.pdf+Jules+Janick+purdue+squash&hl=en&gl=us

[this is the site with this fun paper
Erotic Use of Lagenaria in Renaissance Art <http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/lagenaria_reprint.pdf 
 > ]

Purdue has their History of Horticulture class online. This slide is  
quite good as it shows
centers for crop origins. http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/history/lecture05/lec05.html

Also see this database
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/iconography/

You might find http://www.cucurbit.org/ also to be useful or fun.

For a circa 1480's Old World Gourd see
http://pro.corbis.com/Enlargement/Enlargement.aspx?id=MA00674A&ext=1

I'll conclude now before this gets too long.

Johnnae

On Sep 18, 2009, at 3:10 PM, Raphaella DiContini wrote:

> That would be wonderful! I'm also not sure which edition the Scappi  
> translation is based on, but I do have some translation questions,  
> here and there. :)
> It looks like the name Scully is translating from his source  
> document as "squash" is zucca, and in one case he says "the name of  
> a dish is Spanish, deriving from carabazza, the spanish word for  
> Scappi's zucca, Squash." He also says the qualifier "local"  
> identifies crook-neck squash.
> There are 4 "squash" recipes in a row in book II, from 218-221, and  
> most of them are for soups.
> In joyous service, Raffaella
>
>
>> On 9/18/09 10:19 AM, "David Friedman" <ddfr at daviddfriedman.com>
>> wrote:
>>> Is there some way of telling whether the word translated as "squash"
>>> refers to New World vegetables (probably C. Pepo) or to the old  
>>> world
>>> edible gourds? I don't know whether or not the former
>> were in common
>>> use that early.
>