Fried Gourd

Just a short recipe today, again from Philippine Welser’s recipe collection:

Pumpkin, from Leonhart Fuchs’ 1543 herbal courtesy of wikimedia commons

129 If you want to fry pumpkin

Cut the pumpkin crosswise (braydt), parboil it, and then lay the slices out on a board until they are drained (versechnet). Then turn them over in flour and fry them. Sprinkle sugar on them and serve them warm.

It’s not really much of a recipe, and I wonder how it got included, but it serves as a reminder that not every preparation needed to be elaborate to be popular. We actually can’t be sure what fruit was used for it. The name Kürbis (spelled kir wis) still refers to both Old World lagenaria and New World curcubita crops. By 1550, American curcubita had become established in gardens throughout Europe to the point they were no longer seen as novelties, but as a regular type of gourd. It is a probable candidate, but so is Lagenaria siceraria bottle gourd. Most likely, that mattered less than the freshness and softness of the fruit on hand anyway.

You can fry pumpkin like that, and it even tastes rather good. Interestingly, it also seems that people in the general region have been doing it for quite a long time. Walafrid Strabo’s ninth-century poem on gardening, the liber de cultura hortorum , describes something that sounds strikingly similar:

…inter opes transire ciborum / sæpe videmus, et ardenti sartagine pinguem / combibere arvinam, et placidum secmenta saporem / ebria multotiens mensis præstare secundis…

…We often see them being passed around among a wealth of dishes, drinking the fat of the bubbling pan, and many times do the pieces of gentle flavour, having drunk their fill, stand out among the second course…

The secunda mensa, literally the second table or second course, was the final course in the Roman tradition. Fruit and sweet confections would be served at this point in the meal. Walafrid Strabo sees fried gourds (in his case obviously Lagenaria siceraria) fitting in here. The dish described by Philippine Welser is not a typical banquet dish in the Renaissance tradition, but it is also sweet. That need not mean it was envisioned as fruit or that this is a living tradition – but it could be. Dishes can be very long-lived once they are established.

Philippine Welser (1527-1580), a member of the prominent and extremely wealthy Welser banking family of Augsburg, was a famous beauty of her day. Scandalously, she secretly married Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg in 1557 and followed him first to Bohemia, then to Tyrol. A number of manuscripts are associated with her, most famously a collection of medicinal recipes and one of mainly culinary ones. The recipe collection, addressed as her Kochbuch in German, was most likely produced around 1550 when she was a young woman in Augsburg. It may have been made at the request of her mother and was written by an experienced scribe. Some later additions, though, are in Philippine Welser’s own hand, suggesting she used it.

The manuscript is currently held in the library of Ambras Castle near Innsbruck as PA 1473 and was edited by Gerold Hayer as Das Kochbuch der Philippine Welser (Innsbruck 1983).

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