Ann Bot. 2016 Jul;118(1):53-69. doi: 10.1093/aob/mcw080. Epub 2016 Jun 24.
- 1Dartmouth College, Rassias Center for World Languages and Cultures, 6071 Blunt, Suite 315, Hanover, NH 03755-3526, USA.
- 2Agricultural Research Organization, Newe Ya'ar Research Center, PO Box 1021, Ramat Yishay 3009500, Israel hsparis@agri.gov.il.
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND AIMS:
Summer
squash, the young fruits of Cucurbita pepo, are a common, high-value
fruit vegetable. Of the summer squash, the zucchini, C. pepo subsp. pepo
Zucchini Group, is by far the most cosmopolitan. The zucchini is easily
distinguished from other summer squash by its uniformly cylindrical
shape and intense colour. The zucchini is a relatively new
cultivar-group of C. pepo, the earliest known evidence for its existence
having been a description in a book on horticulture published in Milan
in 1901. For this study, Italian-language books on agriculture and
cookery dating from the 16th to 19th centuries have been collected and
searched in an effort to follow the horticultural development and
culinary use of young Cucurbita fruits in Italy.
FINDINGS:
The
results indicate that Cucurbita fruits, both young and mature, entered
Italian kitchens by the mid-16th century. A half-century later, round
and elongate young fruits of C. pepo were addressed as separate cookery
items and the latter had largely replaced the centuries-old culinary use
of young, elongate bottle gourds, Lagenaria siceraria Allusion to a
particular, extant cultivar of the longest fruited C. pepo, the
Cocozelle Group, dates to 1811 and derives from the environs of Naples.
The Italian diminutive word zucchini arose by the beginning of the 19th
century in Tuscany and referred to small, mature, desiccated bottle
gourds used as containers to store tobacco. By the 1840s, the Tuscan
word zucchini was appropriated to young, primarily elongate fruits of C.
pepo The Zucchini Group traces its origins to the environs of Milan,
perhaps as early as 1850. The word zucchini and the horticultural
product zucchini arose contemporaneously but independently. The results
confirm that the Zucchini Group is the youngest of the four
cultivar-groups of C. pepo subsp. pepo but it emerged approximately a
half-century earlier than previously known.
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The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the
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KEYWORDS:
Cocozelle; Cucurbita pepo; Italian cookery; Italian horticulture; Lagenaria siceraria; Summer squash; Zucchini; courgette; gourd
