[Sca-cooks] European squash/pumpkin/gourd?

[Julia Szent-Gyorgyi]

A friend wants me to make a butternut squash and sweet potato soup for
a vigil this weekend. While a nice warm, creamy soup like this will
suit the weather forecast for the weekend perfectly, it bugs me that
as far as I know, neither butternut squash nor sweet potato were known
to pre-17th century Europeans. However, there is a fairly similar
recipe to the modern one in one of the late 16th-early 17th century
Hungarian recipe collections:

To cook _tök_ in milk.
Peel it, cut the meaty part small, boil it in clean water, then strain
away the liquid with a strainer, cut it up small, dilute it with
scalded milk, and fry/toast some onion into it, with sour cream, or
buttermilk, it is all good.

And the Prince of Transylvania's Court Cookbook has a version as well
(my translation):
Cook the tree-climbing _tök_ thus.
Peel off its outer rind nice and thinly, if the seeds have not
matured, slice it up seeds and all, and if the seeds are mature, slice
off only the outer part, and cook it in clean water; when it has
cooked, pour it on a sifter or sieve, let all the water go out of it.
Put it on the table, make a cutting knife from a shingle, cut it on
the table, cut up onions as well, fry them in butter for the flavor,
put it in a fitting pot, and strain sweet milk onto it in the usual
way; when you want to serve it, make a large omelette from eggs, when
you serve it in the bowl, put a bridge, put the omelette whole on
that, and butter the _tök_ in the bowl.

Modernly, _tök_ means anything in the squash/gourd/pumpkin/marrow
category. It's common to differentiate types according to how you
prepare them: there's "cooking squash", meaning a pale yellow summer
squash, and "baking squash", meaning pumpkin.

Does anyone have any ideas what sort of squash or pumpkin was meant in
the 16th-17th century recipes, and/or what sorts of squash or pumpkin
were available in late-period Europe?

Julia
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