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 presiding over more than a dozen different fruits and vegetables for sale (Fig. 1), including several cucurbits. A large yellow, oblate, ribbed pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo L. subsp. pepo Pumpkin Group) supports a plate of apricots. A basket with a handle, filled to overflowering, contains a number of black-green, warted, spherical to oblate, deeply furrowed, orange-fleshed cantaloupes (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, straightneck, vegetable marrow and zucchini squash, as well as various pumpkins (Paris 2001). The culinary use of flowers, staminate as well as pistillate, on the day of, or day after anthesis is fairly widespread today in Italy and other countries and may have been practiced by Native Americans before the European encounter. Young, tender cucurbit foliage is also consumed in some regions. Both staminate and pistillate flower buds are included in Campi’s painting. The largest ones, towards the left of the box, appear to have been harvested on the day prior to anthesis (Fig.