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

[Terry Decker]

Sweet potatoes are first mentioned in the log of Columbus's first voyage and 
by the first quarter of the 16th Century were being spread along the 
Spanish/Portuguese trade routes.  The were well established in Ottoman 
regions by 1570 (IIRC).

New World squashes appear in Leonard Fuch's Herbal (about 1540) as being 
cultivated in Turkey.  The New World cucurbits could very possibly have been 
in Central Europe by the mid-16th Century.

I'm about 600 miles from my library, so precise sources and dates are a 
little difficult.

Bear

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:

<clipped>

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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