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

[Alec Story]

To my knowledge, only the bottle-gourds, _Lagenaria_ are old world.  There
are no true squashes outside of the new world.

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018, 12:00 PM Julia Szent-Gyorgyi <jpmiaou at gmail.com wrote:

> 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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