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

[Margaret Rendell]

I don't know anything about gourds, but I have seen sweet potato recipes
(although I'm not clear on what plant it was they were referring to as
"sweet potato").
There's a sweet potato recipe in Eleanor Fettiplace (1605?)

I remember entering a competition many years ago with a dish that was
basically fruit paste made with lemon and sweet potatoes. I think it was a
16th Century Spanish recipe. Will try to find it again. (Not the sort of
recipe you were looking for, but it would give a date...)

Margaret

On Thu, 18 Oct 2018 at 06:55, Julia Szent-Gyorgyi <jpmiaou at gmail.com> wrote:

> Quoth Thorvald:
> >   There is one distantly possible in the Transylvanian cookbook (c.
> 1600).
> That's one of the ones I included in my question. What do you consider
> it "distantly possible" for, and why?
>
> So based on Scappi and that fruit-seller painting, among others, I'm
> pretty sure that both zucchini-like and pumpkin-like vegetables (or
> botanically actually fruits) were available in late period, at least
> in southern climes and areas that traded with them. But that doesn't
> help interpret the recipes: peeling, cutting up, and cooking in water
> would work with any type of squash, really, and both zucchini and
> pumpkin would work well flavored with toasted/fried onion and
> milk/cream/sour cream.
>
> But! I just noticed that the next recipe in the Transylvanian cookbook
> is also basically the same, but for cucumber:
>
> From cucumber thusly.
> You can also cook it from cucumber thus, if you cannot get _tök_. Make
> an omelette for this, too, if you serve it at one table for many,
> slice up the omelette, like they do with bacon for peas; you can cook
> this _tök_ or cucumber with sour cream, too, as well as with sweet
> milk.
>
> I've never cooked a cucumber. (Unless you count fermentation/pickling
> as cooking.) Anyone have any experience with this? I would suspect
> cucumber to behave a lot more like zucchini than like pumpkin, meaning
> that these recipes are for a summer squash-type vegetable.
>
> Julia
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