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

[Johnna Holloway]

Cucurbita pepo (pumpkin, squash, new world gourds) are New World but they were brought over to Europe and incorporated into
European cookery in the 16th century. The supposition is that they replaced the older seen as inferior old world gourds and marrows, and in some cases even took over the name of the older gourd.

For instance the squash blossoms even turn up in paintings by the 1580s. 
Early evidence for the culinary use of squash flowers in Italy



A famous painting entitled The Fruit Seller (Fruittivendola) painted in 1580 by Vincenzo Campi located in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, depicts an elegant lady vender with a lapful of peaches holding a bunch of black grapes presi-ding over more than a dozen different fruits and vegetables for sale (Fig. 1), including several cucurbits. A large yellow, oblate, ribbed pump-kin (Cucurbita pepo L. subsp. pepo Pumpkin Group) supports a plate of apricots. A basket with a handle, filled to overflowing, contains a number of black-green, warted, spherical to oblate, deeply furrowed, orange-fleshed canta-loupes (Cucumis melo L. subsp. melo Cantalupensis Group). On the far right at the edge of the painting is a box shared by small red pears ('Moscatelle') and flower buds of C. pepo. Except for the pink roses clearly distributed for decorative purposes, among fava beans in a large woven basket in the right foreground, there is no doubt that all of the items on display were intended for culinary purposes. The squash flower buds are clustered and stacked together and to the right appears to be some young, tender foliage, suggesting that these too must have been intended as kitchen items. The culinary use of the fruits is, of course, by far the most common and economically important use of the highly polymorphic C. pepo, which includes a number of diverse forms known as acorn, cocozelle, crookneck, scallop, straight-neck, vegetable marrow and zucchini squash, as well as various pumpkins (Paris, 2001). The culi-nary use of flowers, staminate as well as pistil-late, on the day of, or day after anthesis is fair-ly widespread today in Italy and other countries and may have been practiced by Native Americans before the European encounter. 
(PDF) Early evidence for the culinary use of squash flowers in Italy. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228887425_Early_evidence_for_the_culinary_use_of_squash_flowers_in_Italy <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228887425_Early_evidence_for_the_culinary_use_of_squash_flowers_in_Italy> [accessed Oct 17 2018].

And showing up in art as early as the first decade of the 16th century
First Known Image of Cucurbita in Europe, 1503–1508 
HARRY S. PARIS <> MARIE-CHRISTINE DAUNAY <> MICHEL PITRAT <>JULES JANICK <>
Annals of Botany, Volume 98, Issue 1, 1 July 2006, Pages 41–47,

Abstract
• Background The genus Cucurbita (pumpkin, squash, gourd) is native to the Americas and diffused to other continents subsequent to the European contact in 1492. For many years, the earliest images of this genus in Europe that were known to cucurbit specialists were the two illustrations of C. pepopumpkins that were published in Fuchs' De Historia Stirpium, 1542. Images of fruits of two Cucurbita species, drawn between 1515 and 1518, were recently discovered in the Villa Farnesina in Rome.
• Findings An even earlier image of Cucurbita exists in the prayer book, Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne, illustrated by Jean Bourdichon in Touraine, France, between 1503 and 1508. This image, which shows a living branch bearing flowers and fruits, had not been examined and analysed by cucurbit specialists until now. The image is identified as depicting Cucurbita pepo subsp. texana. Unlike some of the fruits of Cucurbita depicted in the Villa Farnesina a decade later, this image does not depict an esculent and does not constitute evidence of early European contact with New World agriculture. Based on the descriptive, ecological and geographical accounts of C. pepo subsp. texana in the wild, the idea is considered that the image was based on an offspring of a plant found growing along the Gulf Coast of what is now the United States.

For a good paper as to how the new world squashes show up in 16th century Italian cuisine, see A time for change: new world foods in old world menus Taught at Pennsic 35 by Mistress Helewyse de Birkestad

http://www.medievalcookery.com/helewyse/files/newworld.pdf <http://www.medievalcookery.com/helewyse/files/newworld.pdf>

Johnnae

> On Oct 17, 2018, at 11:59 AM, 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:
> snipped