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

[Alec Story]

I should have signed that...

- Þórfinnr

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018, 12:29 PM Alec Story <avs38 at cornell.edu wrote:

> 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
>> /\ /\
>> >*.*<
>> _______________________________________________
>> Sca-cooks mailing list
>> Sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org
>> http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/sca-cooks-ansteorra.org
>>
>