Italian horticultural and culinary records of summer squash (Cucurbita pepo, Cucurbitaceae) and emergence of the zucchini in 19th-century Milan

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.

INTRODUCTION

Summer squash, the young fruits of Cucurbita pepo L., are a common, high-value fruit vegetable (Paris 2008). Summer squash are among the most widely grown cucurbits worldwide, though it is difficult to estimate how much is actually produced because agricultural statistics usually combine total production of all squash and pumpkins. Summer squash are easily grown, producing fruits from approx. 50 d after sowing, 40 d after transplanting. By far the most cosmopolitan cultivar-group of the summer squash is the zucchini, which is also known as courgette in the UK and France. Globally, the C. pepo Zucchini Group may have more monetary value than any other cultivar- group of squash or pumpkin, maybe more than all C. pepo or even all Cucurbita combined.

Although the zucchini is the commercial leader among the squash and pumpkins, historical records indicate that it is one of the youngest among the eight edible-fruited cultivar-groups of Cucurbita pepo (Paris, 2000b). To date, the oldest known reference to the zucchini is in the second edition of the Italian book Orticoltura, which was published in Milan. The author, Domenico Tamaro (1901), described the Zucca quarantina vera nana (forty-day true dwarf zucca) as bushy with short stems, deeply divided leaves, very early and highly productive, bearing fruits that were long, cylindrical, dark green flecked with white, and eaten when young. The zucchini was introduced to the USA in the early 20th century, where it was first heralded as a distinct market type of squash in the Los Angeles area. Goldman (2004), in The compleat squash, cited the 1918 catalogues of Germain Seed Company and Aggeler & Musser, two seed vendors based in Los Angeles, which introduced the zucchini as ‘Italian’ Squash. The following year, Germain called it ‘Italian’ or ‘Zucchini’ Squash. In 1920, it became ‘Germain’s Zucchini’ and was accompanied by a photograph of Marcell’s Café, a Los Angeles restaurant where this squash had become a feature on the menu. Tapley et al. (1937), in The vegetables of New York, described both ‘Zucchini’ and ‘Black Zucchini’ as new arrivals to the USA from Italy. Though distinct from one another in some foliar traits, these two cultivars had in common long, uniformly cylindrical fruits, with a length to width ratio of 4·0–4·5, which were intense green when young, becoming black-green at maturity. The names of old, open-pollinated cultivars of zucchini from Italy, ‘Nano Verde di Milano’ and ‘Nero di Milano’, are consistent with an origin in the environs of Milan. Indeed, the American ‘Fordhook Zucchini’, introduced by the Burpee Seed Co. in 1942, is strikingly similar to ‘Nano Verde di Milano’ (Paris 2001).

With the help of facsimile reprints and newly digitalized old literature, we have been able to access Italian-language books on cookery and horticulture dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Our goal was to search this literature for references to the zucchini that antedate Domenico Tamaro’s Orticoltura of 1901. In so doing, we were able to obtain an improved assessment of the horticultural development and usage in cookery of Cucurbita in general, and C. pepo summer squash in particular, from several decades after their earliest known recorded introduction to Italy during the second decade of the 16th century (Janick and Paris, 2006). Herein we present the results of this search.

METHODS

Nomenclature and etymology

Names for various cucurbits, as used commonly in many languages, are often highly confused taxonomically (Paris et al., 2011, 2012b, c; Paris, 2015). For example, Citrullus, the scientific Latin name for watermelon, was originally the medieval southern Latin word citrulus, for cucumber, Cucumis sativus L., preserved as cetriolo, the modern Italian word for cucumber in central and southern Italy. The word cocomero refers to cucumber in northern Italy, but it means watermelon in central Italy (Marzullo, 2003). Another example is the cucumis described by Columella and Pliny. The cucumis was not cucumber, as widely believed, but instead snake melon, Cucumis melo L. Flexuosus Group (Janick et al., 2007; Paris and Janick, 2010–2011). Yet another example is the confusion in the use of the words pumpkin and squash which, etymologically, are best considered, respectively, as round and non-round edible fruits of Cucurbita (Paris, 2000b, 2016).

The word zucchini is an Italian plural diminutive of zucca (pl. zucche), which was originally applied to the calabash or bottle gourd, Lagenaria siceraria (Mol.) Standl. The northern Italian zucca, in turn, is an inversion of the southern Italian cocuzza (pl. cocuzze), which is a derivative of cucurbita, the Roman Latin word for the bottle gourd (Paris, 2000b; Janick et al., 2007). The French and British English word courgette is synonymous with the word zucchini. The word courgette is the diminutive of the French courge which, likewise, is derived from the Latin cucurbita. The word courgette has been in use since the late 1920s (Jacobsohn, 2005). The words zucchini and courgettes have sometimes been loosely used for any young fruits of C. pepo subsp. pepo, from round to elongate, as well as for fruits of other Cucurbita species, and even for bottle gourds and young sponge gourds, Luffa aegyptiaca Mill.

Definition of zucchini

Cucurbita pepo has two cultivated subspecies, subsp. pepo and subsp. texana (Scheele) Filov, each of which encompasses four edible-fruited cultivar-groups (Paris, 2000b). These eight cultivar-groups are distinguished on the basis of fruit shape (Paris, 1986) (Fig. 1). Fruit shape is easily observed by all concerned with squash. Cucurbit fruit shape is largely determined early in ovary development (Périn et al., 2002) and does not change radically as the fruits develop (Figs 2 and 3). As a trait that is under polygenic control, fruit shape should to a large extent be reflective of genetic relationships, and this has been confirmed through analysis of DNA sequence polymorphisms (Katzir et al., 2000; Ferriol et al., 2003; Paris et al., 2003, 2015; Formisano et al., 2012; Gong et al., 2012).

Fig. 1.

Schematic representations of fruits from each of the eight edible-fruited cultivar-groups of Cucurbita pepo (Paris, 1986).

Fig. 2.

Young fruits of Cucurbita pepo, one from each edible-fruited cultivar-group. Left to right, top row, subsp. texana: Acorn, Straightneck, Crookneck, Scallop. Left to right, bottom row, subsp. pepo: Pumpkin, Vegetable Marrow, Cocozelle, Zucchini.

Fig. 3.

One mature fruit from each of the eight edible-fruited cultivar-groups of Cucurbita pepo. Top left: Pumpkin; bottom left: Vegetable Marrow; left to right: Cocozelle, Zucchini, Acorn; at right, top to bottom: Scallop, Crookneck, Straightneck.

The cultivar-group Zucchini is distinguished from all others of C. pepo by its fruit shape, which is uniformly cylindrical with a length to width ratio of 3·5–5·0 (Paris, 1986). The other seven cultivar-groups (fruit shapes) are Cocozelle (long bulbous cylindrical), Vegetable Marrow (short tapered cylindrical), Pumpkin (round), Scallop (flattened, with scalloped edges), Acorn (turbinate, with ridges and furrows), Crookneck (elongate, with a curved, narrow neck at the stem end) and Straightneck (elongate, with a constriction near the stem end) (Figs 1–3). The first four are classified within subsp. pepo and the last four within subsp. texana. Some pumpkins, as well as almost all zucchinis, cocozelles, vegetable marrows, scallops, crooknecks and straightnecks, are usually harvested for culinary use when young. Other pumpkins as well as the acorn squash are usually harvested when mature.

Culinary advantage of long, narrow fruit shape

As a result of the structure of the ovary in the Cucurbitaceae, long, narrow cucurbit fruits have a greater proportion than round cucurbit fruits of coloured exocarp and firm mesocarp, at the expense of the soft, stringy, partially hollow, seedy endocarp (Sinnott and Durham, 1929). This proportional increase of exocarp and mesocarp volume imparts a more sensually pleasing, ‘meaty’ quality to young fruits consumed whole. Long-fruited melons (Cucumis melo Flexuosus Group and Adzhur Group), cucumbers (Cucumis sativus L.) and long-fruited bottle gourds (Lagenaria siceraria), as well as other long-fruited cucurbit taxa, are grown for the culinary use of the young fruits. This same culinary advantage was the driving force behind the several independent evolutions of long fruitedness in C. pepo, of the Cocozelle, Crookneck and Zucchini Groups (Paris, 2000b; Gong et al., 2012).

Sources of evidence

A reasonably accurate understanding of the history of food crops is best achieved using a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses botany, horticulture, cookery, philology and history (Dalby, 2003). The evidence can take the form of archaeological remains, iconography and literature. Archaeological remains, though, are limited by their abundance and state of preservation, and iconography and literature are limited by their degree of accuracy and detail. For the history of pumpkins and squash, the major contributing form of evidence has been iconography (Eisendrath, 1961; Zeven and Bradenburg, 1986; Paris, 2000b).

Abundant well-preserved remains of Cucurbita, thousands of years old, have been found in the Americas (Whitaker and Cutler, 1971; Whitaker, 1981; Cowan, 1997; Simon, 2011). No remains that can be positively identified as of Cucurbita have been described from outside of the Americas that antedate the first voyage of Columbus in 1492. The earliest known records of Cucurbita in the Old World are images produced in France and Italy during the first two decades of the 16th century (Janick and Paris, 2006; Paris et al., 2006). The oldest images of Cucurbita in Italy, located at the Villa Farnesina, Rome, depict gourds and pumpkins of C. pepo and pumpkins of C. maxima Duchesne. Images of Cucurbita, often accompanied by terse descriptions, proliferated during the mid-16th century. Nearly all are of C. pepo and include depictions of pumpkins, scallop squash, acorn squash and various gourds (Paris, 2000b). By the mid-17th century, with the publication of the Historia plantarum universalis (Bauhin, 1651) and Stirpium sciagraphia et icones (Chabrey, 1666), images and descriptions indicate the presence in Europe of five edible-fruited cultivar-groups of C. pepo. These five were the Pumpkin, Vegetable Marrow and Cocozelle Groups of C. pepo subsp. pepo and the Acorn and Scallop Groups of C. pepo subsp. texana (Paris, 2000b). Most noteworthy of the 18th-century illustrations of C. pepo are those 364 that were produced by Antoine Nicolas Duchesne (1747–1827) to document his massive work on crossability in Cucurbita (Paris, 2000a), the results of which are summarized in a small book (Duchesne, 1786). These 364 drawings, most of them life-like watercolors, were recently copied digitally and published (Paris, 2007). The drawings depict fruits from 93 cultivars of C. pepo, including many gourds and the same five edible cultivar-groups, but no zucchini.

The pre-Renaissance gourds of Italy

Pumpkins, squash and gourds, genus Cucurbita, are sometimes confused with bottle gourds, Lagenaria siceraria. Bottle gourds have been grown on the Italian peninsula since Roman times, and the Roman Latin word for them was cucurbita (Janick et al., 2007). The first-century authors Columella and Pliny wrote that long, narrow cucurbita (bottle gourds), harvested young and tender (Fig. 4), were scraped or peeled and then cooked. Bottle gourds having a broader shape were used when mature, hard and dry, after extraction of the seeds, for sundry purposes such as vessels and containers.

Fig. 4.

Long, edible-fruited bottle gourds, Lagenaria siceraria, Italian cucuzzi, zucche, for sale at Pagani Nocera Market, southern Italy, 21 July 2009.

Young, light green, long-fruited bottle gourds, at harvest, are illustrated in manuscripts known as Tacuinum Sanitatis, which were composed near the end of the 14th century in northern Italy. The illustration of a plant bearing long-fruited Lagenaria siceraria in one of these manuscripts, known as Liège 1041, is labelled Cucurpite a zuche (Paris et al., 2009). The Carrara Herbal, produced in approx. 1400 at Padua, has an illustration of a light green long-fruited L. siceraria labelled çucha (Baumann, 1974). The late-14th century Italian manuscript on cookery known as Libro della cocina, written by the Anonymous Tuscan (Anonimo Toscano, 1863), contains a section with recipes calling for peeled, young zucche. In the Libro de arte coquinaria, Maestro Martino di Rossi (1465), cook to Cardinal Trevisan at the papal court in the mid-15th century, presented recipes for fried zucche, a torte made with zucche and fresh cheese, and ‘carabazze, i.e. zucche Catalan style’; a closely related compilation from the second half of the 15th century, Cuoco Napoletano, has recipes for peeled or scraped zuche, and the similar early 16th century Manoscritto Lucano uses the word coccoce instead of zucche throughout (Scully, 2000).

Distinguishing Cucurbita from Lagenaria

Upon introduction to Italy of pumpkins and gourds of the genus Cucurbita shortly after 1492 (Janick and Paris, 2006), the use of the word zucca was expanded to encompass these new arrivals. To interpret Renaissance and post-Renaissance Italian writings concerned with culinary preparation and horticulture of zucche more accurately, familiarity with some characteristics distinguishing between Lagenaria siceraria and Cucurbita species is necessary.

Lagenaria siceraria, bottle gourds or calabash gourds, are easily distinguished from Cucurbita, pumpkins and squash. L. siceraria plants are cool sensitive, rampant vines, with soft foliage, rounded leaf laminae and white flowers (Heiser, 1993). In temperate climates, they begin to flower during mid- to late summer. The foliage and young fruits have a fetid odour. Depending on the cultigen, the fruits can have a myriad of shapes, but those used for culinary purposes are long and narrow. The young fruits are almost invariably light green, rarely dark green, with a pilose surface. They are edible, but the surface is scraped off or peeled immediately prior to culinary preparation. Mature fruits can exceed a metre in length. As the fruits mature, the hairs slough off and the surface becomes glabrous. The rind turns from light green to beige or brown and becomes lignified, and the fruit pulp desiccates. The thick, lignified rind adapts mature bottle gourds to a variety of uses, most often as vessels for liquids. Linné (1753) named the bottle gourd Cucurbita lagenaria but, later, the bottle gourd was moved to its own, separate genus, Lagenaria.

Both Cucurbita and Lagenaria siceraria are monoecious, but Cucurbita has orange-yellow or yellow flowers. The contrast between C. pepo and Lagenaria is particularly striking, as C. pepo plants have harsh foliage, angular leaf laminae and can be viney but are often bushy. Moreover, C. pepo plants are cool tolerant, flowering and producing young edible fruits by early to mid-summer. Furthermore, the young fruits of C. pepo, which can be dark or light green, or striped green, or yellow, are glossy and neither have a disagreeable odour nor require scraping or peeling prior to culinary preparation. As will be discussed (below), these advantages led to gradual phasing out of the use of L. siceraria as a food item and its replacement by C. pepo. As the fruits of C. pepo mature, they usually change in colour, becoming darker green, orange, dark or light yellow, or almost white. Fruits of C. moschata Duchesne, a tropical species having rampant vines, can have long necks and quite often have intense orange mature fruit flesh. C. maxima also has rampant vines and is grown primarily for consumption of its mature fruit flesh, which often has superior quality to that of other Cucurbita species. Although many pumpkins and squash develop lignified rinds, they do not readily desiccate and can remain in edible condition for months if stored properly.

16TH- AND 17TH-CENTURY ITALIAN CUCURBITA AND LAGENARIA

In botanical herbals, fruits of the genus Cucurbita were often distinguished from those of Lagenaria by one of various adjectives indicative of an exotic origin, such as indiane, marine and turchesche. For example, the grooved pumpkin, C. pepo, illustrated in the Commentarii secundo aucti in libros sex of the Italian botanist P. A. Mattioli (Mattioli, 1558), is labelled Zucche Indiane. A later work by this author, De plantis epitome utilissima, has an illustration of a ribbed pumpkin, also C. pepo, labelled Zucche Indiane, oltra marine (Mattioli 1586). The Italian botanist Castore Durante (1585), in his Herbario Nuovo, depicted a grooved pumpkin of C. pepo labelled Zucca Indiana with synonyms Oltramarine and Marine, and described it as having rough foliage, large, yellow flowers and bearing fruits varying greatly in size, shape and colour. In 1567, the physician Costanzo Felici da Piobbico wrote his Lettera sulle insalate to Ulisse Aldrovandi, a naturalist at the University of Bologna. In it, he mentioned the zucca nostrata (our own or local zucca) along with other zucche of varying shapes and colours referred to as turche or saraceniche (Felici, 1986).

Aldrovandi, in the late 16th century, drew watercolours of over two dozen fruits of Cucurbita (Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, 2016). These included small gourds, most of which he labelled colocynthis. All but four of the larger, edible C. pepo were labelled cucurbita indica. These four remaining fruits, one oblong pumpkin and three vegetable marrows, were labelled nostrata (our own). Thus, only a century after the first voyage of Columbus, elongate C. pepo had become established in Italy. Also in the late 16th century, the Italian painter Vincenzo Campi, in The Fruit Seller, illustrated C. pepo shoot tips and flowers, including female flower buds with elongate ovaries resembling those of the cocozelle ‘Romanesco’ (Paris and Janick, 2005).

Domenico Romoli (1560, Venice) presented numerous recipes specifying zucca marina. In the 1570 Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi, the Vatican chef and personal cook to Pope Pius V, recipes distinguish between the zucche and cocuzze nostrali and the zucche Turchesche and cocuzze marine (Scappi, 1570). Clearly, by no later than the mid-16th century in Italy, the differences between cocuzze/zucche of Lagenaria and Cucurbita were not only obvious to well-educated botanists and physicians; the fruits of Cucurbita had made their way into Italian kitchens.

Alessandro Petronio (1592, Rome) indicated that the Zucche forastiere (foreign zucche) were also called Zucche Indiane. Giovanvettorio Soderini (1596) discussed the zucche bianche lunghe (light-coloured or white, long zucche), which would be the long-fruited Lagenaria siceraria, and the zucche Indiane, both of which had viney plants. The fruits of the latter were green, yellow, mottled or black, evidently Cucurbita, of which there were two groups. One, the primaticcia, bore its fruits very early in the season; evidently, these were summer squash. The fruits of the other, marina, were harvested mature, when they had hard rinds, could be stored all winter, and had a pleasing flavour; these were winter squash or pumpkins.

Giacomo Castelvetro (1614) of Modena described the zucchi bianchi lunghi as long, light-coloured fruits, about as thick as an arm, of which the small tender ones were eaten after being peeled (Riley, 2012). These zucchi were undoubtedly long-fruited Lagenaria siceraria. An account is also given of the zucche marine, described as varying in colour, from entirely green, to green and yellow, or white, and in shape from elongate to round to flat. These were good to eat from about midsummer when they were young, and cooked like one cooks cucumbers. Given the colour range and early fruit production, the zucche marine must have been summer squash of Cucurbita pepo, and the allusion to cucumber indicates elongate fruits. Castelvetro also wrote that the ends of the shoots could be cut and, if they had attached young zucche the size of an olive or smaller, so much the better because they add flavour to the dish, the allusion to olive suggesting a round or oval fruit. Massonio (1627) indicated that briefly boiled zucche no larger than a hen’s egg could be included in salads, the comparison with an egg again indicating a round or oval fruit. Thus, it would seem that both elongate and round C. pepo fruits entered Italian kitchens, each as a distinct item, by the early 17th century.

Vincenzo Tanara (1644, Bologna) distinguished two kinds of zucche. One, the zucche bianche lunghe dette Cocuzze a Roma (long, light-coloured zucche called cocuzze in Rome) or Zucconi, were climbing plants; the description fits long, edible-fruited bottle gourds (Fig. 4). The others, which had yellow rinds and trailed along the ground, were more widely used, bearing fruits earlier and enjoyed all summer. As the best of these were said to be very meaty, these were probably elongate. The description fits Cucurbita and, given the early fruit production, especially C. pepo. Thus, by the mid-17th century, culinary use of young, elongate fruits of C. pepo had largely replaced the use of L. siceraria.

Antonio Latini (1692), steward to Cardinal Barberini in Rome and later to the Spanish viceroy of Naples, gave directions for a soup of cocuzze di Genova (Genoa) with mushrooms, as well as a Spanish-style soup with onion, green cocuzze and tomato. He mentioned a salad of picciole (tiny) cocuzze wrapped in their leaves and cooked in a brace over hot ashes. As Latini indicated that these tiny green cocuzze, after cooking, were to be cut in long slices or rounds, they must have been long, narrow fruits of C. pepo.

Francisco Cupani (1696, Naples), in his book on horticulture, described several cultivars under the Latin name cucurbita and common name cucuzza. These had soft foliage and white flowers, and therefore were of Lagenaria siceraria. The cucuzzi longhi ò Caravazzi were long fruited and for culinary use. Under the Latin designation pepo and common name cucuzza, Cupani also described cultivars of the genus Cucurbita. Among these can be identified the ornamental warted, pyriform and mock orange gourds, a scallop squash and a pumpkin, all of C. pepo, as well as a cultivar having fruits that were long, large, curved, with ruddy, sweet flesh known as Cucuzza di Spagna (of Spain), evidently C. moschata.

DIMINUTIVE GOURDS, PUMPKINS AND SQUASH IN ITALIAN COOKBOOKS

The Italian word zucchini is but one of the diminutives derived from the words cocuzza and zucca that have been used historically to refer to small, young gourds, pumpkins and squash. The suffix -ini means ‘little’, along with its variant forms -ino, -ina and -ine, according to gender and number. The Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (Battaglia, 2002) indicates numerous other diminutive suffixes. Among those used for small or young cocuzze or zucche were -elle, -ette, -ettine, -ole, -olini, -otti and -ottini. From these suffixes are formed the word cocozelle with its variant spellings, and cocuzzette, cuccuzzedde, zucchette, zucchettine, zuccole, zuccolini, zucotti, zuccottini and zucchini. At times the diminutives seem to have been used indiscriminately, within the same recipe in reference to a single vegetable, but at other times they seem to indicate a particular horticultural type.

Many Italian cookbooks contain recipes for diminutive or young gourds, pumpkins and squash. Here we will discuss those containing descriptions that are sufficient to allow, with some degree of certainty, the identification of particular horticultural types of gourds, pumpkins or squash (Table 1).

Table 1.

Lexicon of Italian diminutives of cocuzze and zucche used in cookbooks for fruits of Cucurbita pepo (pumpkins, squash), 1549–1894

Author	Place and year of publication	Diminutive word(s)	Fruit shape or cultivar-group
Cristoforo di Messisbugo	Ferrara, 1549	Zuccolle	Elongate
Antonio Frugoli	Rome, 1638	Cocuzzette longhe tenere	Cocozelle
Vincenzo Tanara	Bologna, 1644	Zucchettini tenerissimi	Pumpkin
Bartolomeo Stefani	Mantua, 1662	Zuccoli	Elongate
Vicenzo Corrado	Naples, 1781	Zucchette; zucchettine	Elongate and Pumpkin
Vicenzo Corrado	Naples, 1786	Zucchette; fiori di zucche	Cocozelle and Pumpkin
Francesco Leonardo	Rome, 1790	Zucchette	Elongate
Fratelli Vignozzi	Livorno, 1822	Zucchettine tonde e verdi	Pumpkin
Antonio Odescalchi	Como, 1834	Zuchette; zuccolini	Elongate
Ippolito Cavalcanti	Naples, 1839	Cocozzelle lunghe; cocozzoli; cocozzielle	Cocozelle
Fratelli Vignozzi	Livorno, 1844	Zucchette; zucchini	Elongate
Giovanni Brizzi	Siena, 1845	Zucchini	Elongate
Pietro Santi Puppo	Lucca, 1849	Zucchini	Elongate
Francesco Chapusot	Turin, 1851	Coussot; zucchette; zuccotti	Elongate and Pumpkin
Giovanni Vialardi	Turin, 1854	Zuccotti; zuccottini	Pumpkin
Ernesto Oliva	Milan, 1867	Zucchette, zucchini	Cocozelle
Enrico Moro	Florence, 1871	Zucchini, zucchine	Elongate
Giovanni Nelli	Milan, 1880	Zuchette; zucchettine; zuccottini, zucchini	Cocozelle and Pumpkin
Francesco Palma	Naples, 1881	Cocozzelle; cocozzelli	Cocozelle
G. Belloni	Milan, 1890	Zucchette; zucchettine, zucchine	Elongate and Pumpkin
Pellegrino Artusi	Florence, 1891	Zucchini	Elongate
Giovanni Battista Ratto	Genoa, 1893	Zucchini	Elongate
Vitaliano Bossi, Ercole Salvi	Rome, 1894	Zucchette; zucchettine	Elongate and Pumpkin

Cristoforo di Messisbugo (1549), steward at the Este Court in Ferrara (northern Italy), instructed the choosing of tender zuccolle that are not too big for preparing zucche fritte (fried zucche). As zucche were long-fruited Lagenaria and tended to grow quite large, it would seem that the latter were long fruited, but smaller equivalents. In a recipe for a torte, he called for a choice of zucche that included more (dark-coloured) and marine, thus Cucurbita, as young fruits of L. siceraria are typically bianche (light-coloured or white) (Castelvetro, 1614; Tanara, 1644).

Giovanvettorio Soderini (1596) used the word zucchettine in two instances. In one, which is a paraphrasing derived from Pliny (Janick et al., 2007), he stated that if the zucchettine are placed in a hollow cane, they will grow into the shape of the cane, thus forcing the long, narrow shape preferred for culinary preparation. In the other, the zucchettine with long necks and round bodies were used to make vases or vessels to keep liquids. In both cases, he was describing bottle gourds, Lagenaria siceraria, in the first instance tiny, developing fruits and in the second small, mature, desiccated fruits.

The Tuscan author Antonio Frugoli (1638, Rome) in his Pratica e scalcaria (Practical matters and carving) presented directions for preparing cocuzzette longhe tenere (tender, long cocuzzette), stuffed with meat or pinenuts and herbs, or cooked and served as a salad. These cocuzzette undoubtedly resembled the long, edible cocuzzi, L. siceraria, but were smaller equivalents, seemingly of C. pepo cocozelle squash.

Vincenzo Tanara (1644) of Bologna wrote that as soon as the young green shoots of the zucca began to spread across the ground they could be used in the kitchen. Pruning made the vines branch, creating more fruit, and the boiled greens made a delicious salad, especially when served with cracked black pepper and some zucchettini tenerissimi (very tender zucchettini). Castelvetro (1614) had indicated similar use of young shoots of zucche having tiny round fruits, Cucurbita.

Bartolomeo Stefani (1662), chef at the Gonzaga Court in Mantua, gave directions for cooking zucche tenere (tender zucche) or zuccoli, which were to be cut in thin slices, salted to remove the excess liquid, dredged in flour and fried in butter, then served with a herb sauce and cheese. Stefani offered other recipes for when the zucche were more mature. As Lagenaria siceraria fruits become hard and desiccate as they approach maturity, both the zucche tenere and zuccoli were probably long-fruited Cucurbita.

Vincenzo Corrado (1781, 1786), in two cookbooks published in Naples, presented recipes for zucche lunghe, zucchette, zucche vernine, zucchettine and fiori di zucche. The zucche lunghe needed to be peeled and sprinkled with salt until they exuded a bitter liquid, before cooking; these must have been bottle gourds, Lagenaria siceraria. The zucchette were the first to be available in the spring, starting with their shoots, which were cut and boiled in salted water: the zucchette were viney, branching plants. The diminutive zucchette fruits could be cooked in the same fashion as the zucche lunghe, implying that the zucchette were also elongate. The zucche vernine (winter zucche) were big, long, reddish-yellow, had hard rinds and could keep all winter (Corrado, 1781); they could also be served in summer when tender, though better when mature, in winter (Corrado, 1786). The zucche vernine are clearly long-necked squash of C. moschata. In Italy to the present day, both the young and the mature fruits are marketed (Fig. 5). Corrado presented three recipes for zucchettine, including one calling for stuffing them. The word zucchettine implies an even smaller, either younger or shorter, version of zucchette, one recipe calling for them to be hollowed out, blanched and stuffed. Corrado (1786) also wrote that the fiori di zucche (zucche flowers) could be prepared fried or stuffed. These flowers were very probably of Cucurbita, not Lagenaria; Cucurbita flowers have been offered in Italian markets since at least 1590 (Paris and Janick, 2005). The female flowers of cocozelle squash are especially prized because they persist on the fruit (Fig. 6).

Fig. 5.

Marketing in Italy of Cucurbita moschata: at left, young fruits at Ventimiglia, north western Italy, 10 July 2009; and, at right, mature fruits at Pagani Nocera, southern Italy, 21 July 2009.

Fig. 6.

Marketing in Italy of Cucurbita pepo. At the Pagani Nocera Market, southern Italy, 21 July 2009: top left, cocozelle squash with attached flowers; top right, male flowers; centre, zucchini squash (without flowers). At Ventimiglia, north-western Italy, 10 July 2009: bottom, cocozelle squash with attached flowers.

Francesco Leonardo (1790), in L’Apicio moderno (The modern Apicius, Rome), has seven recipes for zucchette. One calls for filling them ‘like a gondola’ and another calls for preparing them ‘as you would cucumbers’, indicating that these zucchette were young, elongate fruits.

The brothers Vignozzi (1822, Livorno), in Il cuciniere all’uso moderno (The cook in modern use), presented a recipe for zucchettine stuffed with minced chicken, Parmesan cheese and herbs. Green, round zucchettine are specified, with the flower and stem removed.

Antonio Odescalchi (1834, Como), in Il cuoco senza pretese (The unpretentious cook), presented recipes for zucche, zucchette and zuccolini. In one recipe, the two words zucchette and zuccolini were used interchangeably, calling for them to be slit transversely, cooked first on one side, then carefully flipped over to cook on the other side, indicating that these were small but long, narrow fruits.

Ippolito Cavalcanti (1839, Naples), in his Cucina teorica-pratica (Theory and practice of cooking), presented various recipes for cocozzoli and cocozzelle (in the Italian section) and cocozzelle and cocozzielle (in the Neapolitan dialect section). These cocozelles were available beginning in May. Depending on the recipe, he calls for the use of nice, straight cocozzelle lunghe (long cocozelles) of various sizes from non molto grandi (not too big) to piccoli (small), and piccolissimi (tiny).

Francesco Chapusot (1851), cook to the English ambassador at the Court of Savoy in Turin, presented a recipe for zucchette, which he identified in the Piemontese dialect as coussot. These were quartered lengthwise, browned in butter, and simmered with broth, sugar, vinegar and cinnamon. He also included recipes for zuccotti.

Giovanni Vialardi (1854), head cook at the court of Vittorio Emanuele II in Turin, included many recipes for zuccotti in his Trattato di cucina. These recipes called for zuccotti ‘the size of a nice egg’, which are to be peeled and stuffed, to six dozen zuccotti ‘the size of a walnut’, which are to be trimmed on both ends before cooking. One recipe uses the words zuccotti and zuccottini interchangeably. Later, Vialardi (1899) called for fresh, green zuccottini the size of apricots, and zuccotti the size of lemons. As the zuccotti and zuccottini are compared with eggs, walnuts, apricots and lemons, it would seem that these were young, diminutive pumpkins.

The Milanese cookbook by Giovanni Nelli (1880) has a section on zuchette and zuccottini, and also presents them by their French name, petite courges (little gourds). The recipes call for zuchette of different sizes, from just after the flower drops off. One calls for zuccottini about the size of an egg. Like Vialardi (1854) before him, Nelli used the word zuccottini for small, young, round fruits.

In Il principe dei cuochi (The Prince of cooks), Francesco Palma (1881, Naples) presented recipes for cocozzelli and cocozzelle. One of the recipes calls for the rind to be peeled and the seeds to be removed, suggestive of a larger or more mature cocozelle squash.

Bossi and Salvi (1894, Rome) presented several recipes for stuffed zucchette, including one that instructs the cook to choose a dozen zucchettine as big as an egg. Comparison with an egg would indicate a very small oval or round fruit, the word zucchettine distinguishing these from the common elongate zucchette. The cookbook of Fratelli Ingegnoli (1895, Milan) recommended specifically the use of nano di Milano.

HISTORICAL USE OF THE WORD ZUCCHINI

The earliest reference that we have found to the word zucchini is as the entry zucchini da tabacco in the first volume of the Dizionario botanico italiano (Italian botanical dictionary) by the Pisan botanist Ottaviano Targioni Tozzetti (1809). Zucchini da tabacco is defined in that book as ‘Cucurbita Lagenaria minima’. The connection with tobacco is clarified in the Vocabolario parmigiano-italiano (Malaspina, 1859), in which zucchini is defined as a small variety of zucca, ‘Cucurbita lagenaria minor Linn.’ used as a container for tobacco. Thus, initially, the word zucchini signified a cultivar of small, mature, dry bottle gourd, Lagenaria siceraria.

The meaning of the word zucchini changed from a utilitarian bottle gourd, Lagenaria siceraria, to a culinary item of Cucurbita pepo by the mid-19th century (Table 1). The brothers Vignozzi (1844, Livorno), in Il cuciniere italiano moderno, ovvero l’amico dei ghiotti economi e dei convalescenti (The modern Italian cook, or the friend of hearty yet thrifty eaters and convalescents), presented recipes for zucchini prepared with rice or pasta. A later edition contains several more recipes for zucchini, variously prepared with other vegetables, rice, pasta, or boiled or fried (Vignozzi, 1851). Another cookbook (Brizzi, 1845, Siena) featured zucchini in several recipes, including quartered small zucchini boiled and served with a sauce of anchovies, capers, garlic, olive oil and vinegar, and a zucchini salad dressed with tarragon sauce. A cookbook written by the palace cook for Napoleon’s sister Elisa in Lucca has a recipe for veal garnished with zucchini, and zucchini stuffed with fish (Puppo, 1849). Another (Oliva, 1867, Milan) has a recipe for minestrone that included zucchini and a recipe for frying zucchini with the flowers attached. Enrico Moro (1871, Florence), in Il cuoco sapiente (The wise cook), presented a number of recipes for zucchine (fem. pl.). The zucchine were green and used in minestrone, or with rice and beans, mushrooms, tomato or eggs, or fried or stuffed. The recipe for zucchine alla salsa, braised whole in olive oil, vinegar and herbs, called for them to be molto piccole, very small, with their flowers and stems removed.

F. Cazzuola (1878) recounted experiments he did with seed dormancy of a number of crops, published in a Tuscan horticultural journal. One of these was with zucca da zucchini, which was commercially important, bearing its young fruits on bush plants early in the season.

Nelli (1880, Milan) presented a recipe for fried zucchini with their blossoms. Belloni (1890, Milan) presented recipes for zucca, zucchette, zucchettine and zucchine. In one recipe, for stuffing the squash, he used the words zucchette and zucchine interchangeably. In their books, Artusi (1891, Florence) and Ratto (1893, Genoa) called for the use of ‘the long type of zucchini’. This indicates that the zucchini were not necessarily long but, for these two writers, long fruits were preferred. Artusi recommended ‘small, long’ zucchini as particularly delicate in a frittata, and in another recipe instructed the cook to cut long zucchini in rounds the size of a coin, which suggests squash of cylindrical shape.

ITALIAN SUMMER SQUASH AND PUMPKINS IN 19TH-CENTURY BOOKS ON AGRICULTURE

There are a number of 19th-century Italian books on agriculture as well as foreign sources mentioning aspects of crops deriving from Italy. Some of these works contain descriptions and information concerning young fruits of Italian squash and pumpkins that are sufficient to identify species, cultivar-groups or even particular cultivars (Table 2). Toward the end of the 19th century, seed companies published annual catalogues of their wares, though the descriptions and illustrations within are less reliable than contemporary scientific publications.

Table 2.

Lexicon of Italian summer squash, Cucurbita pepo, cultigens in 19th-century books on horticulture and agriculture (authors’ synonyms in parentheses)

Author	Place and year of publication	Name of cultigens	Cultivar-group (fruit shape)
Filippo Re*	Milan, 1811	Coccozzelli di San Pasquale (Coconzelli)	Cocozelle
		Zucca a nodi	Crookneck
Potager du Roi (Jacobsohn, 2005)	Versailles, 1820	Courge d’Italie	Cocozelle
A. J. Mérault	Paris, 1827	Coucourzelle (Courge d’Italie)	Cocozelle
Vincenzo Ferrario*	Milan, 1830	Zucca verde e lunga	Cocozelle
		Zucca bianca e tonda	Pumpkin
Gaetano Cantoni	Milan, 1855	Zucca verde e lunga	Cocozelle
		Zucca bianca e tonda	Pumpkin
		Zucca verde quarantina	Zucchini
C. B. Pichat*	Turin, 1866	Zucca da estate (Coccozzelli)	Cocozelle
		Zucca rognosa lunga	Crookneck
		Zucca nana†	Pumpkin
M. Roda and G. Roda*	Turin, 1868	Zucca bianca a cespo	Cocozelle
		Zucca d’Italia	Cocozelle
		Zucca di Ginevra	Pumpkin
Ministry of Agriculture	Rome, 1879	Zucca di napoli (Zucca di quaranta giorni)	Cocozelle
Angelo Nicolosi Gallo	Sicily, 1880	Cuccuzzedda o cucuzza longa (Cuccuzzedda di Napoli a Palermo)	Cocozelle
		Zucca o cucuzza di 40 giorni	Pumpkin
G. Francesco Re	Turin, 1881	Verde quarantina	Zucchini
Alessandra Canevari	Milan, 1884	Zucca quarantina	Zucchini (?)
Fratelli Ingegnoli	Milan, 1891	Zucchetta collo torto	Crookneck
		Zucchetta nana di Milano	Zucchini
Rodolfo Farneti*	Milan, 1892	Cucuzzella (Zucca lunga d’Italia)	Cocozelle
		Zucca bianca	Cocozelle
		Zucca dalla midolla	Vegetable Marrow‡
Domenico Tamaro*	Milan, 1892, 1901, 1916	Zucca a collo torto gialla	Crookneck
		Zucca courgeron di Ginevra	Pumpkin
		Zucca d’Italia (Cuccuzzella)	Cocozelle
		Zucca d’Italia gialla piccola	Cocozelle
		Zucca per forzare	Vegetable Marrow
		Zucca quarantina vera nana	Zucchini
Antonio Aloi	Turin, 1899	Zucca italiana	Cocozelle
		Zucchetta nana di Milano	Zucchini

*Scallop squash, under various names, were mentioned by these authors; however, instead of the young fruits being culinary items, intermediate-age, half-grown fruits were used, or mature fruits used as ornaments.

†Described as round-fruited.

‡Not indicated as grown in Italy, instead in the UK and USA, after Vilmorin (1883).

In Volume 1 of the two-volume L’ortolano dirozzato (The refined gardener), the Bolognese horticulturist Filippo Re (1811) stated that cocozza is the Neapolitan term for zucca, and coconzelli are small, just-formed zucchette sold in the markets for use in the kitchen. In Volume 2, Re wrote that the zucca da estate (summer squash) could be divided by shape into ‘more or less oval’ and round. The flowers were eaten, especially the male ones, followed by the tender zucchettine shortly after fertilization. These fruits could be light-coloured or green. In Naples they are called coccozzelli di San Pasquale. Also, there is an early variety called zucca a nodi in Tuscany. The identity of the first cultivar is clear. ‘San Pasquale’ is an extant cultivar of the Cucurbita pepo Cocozelle Group (Fig. 7A, B). The second, knotted (nodi) one might be of the C. pepo Crookneck Group, ‘Rugosa Friulana’ (Fig. 7C).

Fig. 7.

Young fruits of Italian cultivars of summer squash, Cucurbita pepo. (A and B) The cocozelle ‘San Pasquale’ (Luciano Pignataro Wineblog, Naples, and Sgaravatti, Pergine Valdarno, respectively); (C) the crookneck ‘Rugosa Friulana’ (Franchi Sementi, Grassbio); (D) the cocozelle ‘Striato d’Italia’ (Franchi); (E) the summer pumpkin ‘Tondo Chiaro di Toscana’ (Sais–Società Agricola Italiana Sementi, Cesena); (F) the cocozelle ‘Romanesco’ (Sgaravatti); (G) the cocozelle ‘Alberello sel. Valery’ (Semiorto Sementi, Sarno); (H) the cocozelle ‘Lungo Bianco di Sicilia’ (Franchi); (I) the vegetable marrow ‘Bolognese’ (Franchi); (J and K) the zucchini ‘Nano Verde di Milano’ (Semiorto Sementi and Fratelli Ingegnoli, Milano, respectively).

By 1820, the Courge d’Italie was recorded as having been introduced into the Potager du roi, the king’s vegetable garden at Versailles, France (Jacobsohn, 2005). A. J. Mérault (1827), author of the French gardening book L’art du jardinier, described the Coucourzelle, Courge d’Italie, as having green stripes and attaining a length of 38–45 cm. It had excellent quality when used very young, just after the corolla drops off, when it was approx. 10–13 cm long (Fig. 7D). The coucouzelle, in variant spellings, was again referred to by various authors in 19th-century France. The first known written mention of the cocozelle in the USA is from 1863 (Paris, 2000b).

Vincenzo Ferrario (1830), in La vera agricoltura practica della Lombardia (The true agricultural practice of Lombardy), wrote that there were five principal varieties of zucca, the zucca verde e longa, zucca bianca e tonda, zucchetta bianca coronale, zucca turbante and zucca trombetta. Of these, the first two were eaten when young. Four of these five, as well as a different one, were named by Gaetano Cantoni (1855) of the University of Milan, in the second volume of his Trattato completo di agricoltura (Complete treatise on agriculture) (pp. 117–118):

La zucca (cucurbita pepo) conta molte varietà tanto per la forma, quanto per la qualità e colore della propria sostanza carnosa. Le più coltivate fra queste sono la zucca verde e lunga internamente bianca; la zucca bianca tonda internamente gialla; la zucca a turbante a corteccia strisciata di giallo bianco verde e rosso al di fuori, e la zucca a trombetta a scorza verde, ambedue gialle nell’interno; e finalmente la zucca verde quarantina, bianca internamente.

The zucca (cucurbita pepo) comprises many varieties, grouped as much by shape as by the quality and colour of their flesh. The most cultivated among these are the green and long zucca, with white interior; the light and round zucca, yellow inside; the turban zucca with a striped rind of yellow, white, green and red, and the trumpet zucca, with a green rind, both of them yellow on the inside; and finally, the zucca verde quarantina, white inside.

The first four cultivars are probably, respectively, a cocozelle and a pumpkin of Cucurbita pepo (Fig. 7D, E), a turban squash of C. maxima and a long-fruited cultivar of C. moschata (Fig. 5). The fifth cultivar has an expanded description:

Una varietà assai produttiva, specialmente per smerciare quando il frutto è ancor piccolo, è la zucca quarantina, la quale si distende pochissimo e può dirsi che non esiga alcuna cimatura. Questa potrebbesi eziandio trapiantare, avendola seminata presto in cassette, come dissi praticarsi per aver poponi primaticci.

One very productive variety, especially for marketing when the fruit is still small, is the zucca quarantina, which spreads very little, so it could be said it needs no pruning. It could be transplanted, being sown early in trays to yield fruit early in the season.

A small book on economic botany published in Siena indicates that the mature fruits of the zucca could be kept and eaten all winter (Tassi, 1865). The flowers and immature fruits of the zucche, called zucchettine or zucchini, were also eaten.

Carlo Berti Pichat (1866), in Agricoltura (Turin), listed 18 varieties of Cucurbita and Lagenaria. Among them was Zucca da Estate, summer zucca: ‘The flowers are eaten, especially the male ones, and then the tender zucchettine, called Coccozzelli in Naples’ (Figs 6 and 7A, B, F, G). Another was Zucca nana (Dwarf zucca): ‘Early bearing: it neither spreads nor climbs. It bears fruit of medium size: round, yellow, and with flesh of fair flavour. Its real merit is in producing highly prized zucchettini very early in the season’ (Fig. 7E). Another was Zucca rognosa lunga, which was long, yellow and had protuberances, apparently a C. pepo crookneck (Fig. 7C).

Marcellino and Giuseppe Roda (1868, Turin) described nine cultivars of Cucurbita. Three C. pepo, the Zucca bianca a cespo, Zucca d’Italia and Zucca di Ginevra, were bushy and grown for their small, green zucchette. These three are easily equated, respectively, with the Courge blanche non-coureuse, Courge d’Italie and Courgeron de Genève, two cocozelles and a summer pumpkin that had been described by the French horticulturist Vilmorin (1856). The two cocozelles are illustrated in a later edition (Vilmorin, 1883) and joined with an illustration of the Courgeron de Genève even later (Vilmorin, 1904). The French word courgerons had been used for the summer pumpkins, and the Italian zuccottini and zucchettine are its equivalents.

A volume published by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture (1879, Rome) mentions a Zucca di Napoli o di quaranta giorni. Angelo Nicolosi Gallo (1880), writing on horticulture in Sicily, described two Cucurbita pepo grown for the use of the young fruits. Preferred was the Cuccuzzedda o cucuzza longa, also known as Cuccuzzedda di Napoli a Palermo, Zucca d’Italia. It was very probably the same one described by Vilmorin (1856, 1883) as Courge blanche non-coureuse, and is the extant ‘Lungo Bianco di Sicilia’ (Fig. 7H). The other was Zucca o cucuzza di 40 giorni, stated as being the earliest of all and having a large peduncle. Nearly all C. pepo subsp. pepo have large, thick fruit stems (Paris et al., 2012a), which would appear to be even larger in comparison with relatively short fruits; so this may have been a summer pumpkin (Fig. 7E).

The botanist Giovanni Francesco Re (1881) of Turin, in La flora segusina (The plants of the Susa Valley), wrote that the varieties of zucche were numerous, the fruits being elongate or round. He stated that the Piedmontese diminutive vernacular coussot was used for the variety verde quarantina.

Alessandra Canevari (1884), in the second edition of Coltivazione della piante alimentare (Milan), stated that there were numerous varieties of zucca. One, zucca quarantina, was singled out as quite productive and useful when the fruits were small.

The 1891 seed catalogue of Fratelli Ingegnoli (1891) of Milan lists several zucchette. The zucchetta collo torto, precoce a polpa piena giallo aranciata was, evidently, a cultivar of the Crookneck Group (Fig. 7C). Another zucchetta, the nana di Milano (dwarf of Milan), was said to be ‘An exquisite improvement, fruitful and easy to harvest, not requiring support and forming a bush, at the base of which grows a circle of abundant fruit’. The accompanying illustration indeed shows a bushy plant with five large fruits around it. However, the fruits are short, tapered cylindrical, striped squash, resembling those of some English vegetable marrow cultivars. These fruits, though, were obviously not borne by the plant but instead merely placed around it, as no bush C. pepo can produce five large fruits simultaneously. Zucchetta nana di Milano was a recent introduction, being absent from the 1882 catalogue of the company.

Rodolfo Farneti (1892), in Frutti freschi e secchi ortaggi (Milan), described three cultivars of Cucurbita of which the fruits were eaten immature. These were the long, striped cucuzzella, the similar but plain light-coloured zucca bianca, and the zucca dalla midolla (marrow), as described and illustrated by Vilmorin (1883). He did not mention any zucca verde quarantina or nana di Milano.

Domenico Tamaro (1892), in the first edition of Orticoltura (Milan), described 18 cultivars of Cucurbita pepo, C. maxima and C. moschata, and the descriptions were embellished and supplemented in later editions (Tamaro, 1901, 1916) with an illustration of the Cuccuzzella, syn. Zucca d’Italia, copied from Vilmorin (1883). Six of the 18 cultivars were described as having short stems and bearing fruits that were eaten in erba, very young. From the descriptions of the fruit shape, these are easily identified as a crookneck (a collo torto gialla), a pumpkin (courgeron di Ginevra), two cocozelles (d’Italia syn. Cuccuzzella and d’Italia gialla piccola di Haage e Schmidt), a vegetable marrow (forzare) and a zucchini (quarantina vera nana, 40-day true dwarf). Tamaro described Zucca quarantina vera nana as follows:

Pianta accestita a tralcio corto: foglie piccole, sinuate, dentate, cupe. Frutto lungo, sottile, cilindrico, verde cupo, punteggiato di bianco; a maturità arancione, leggermente reticolato. Varietà primaticcia e molto produttiva, buonissima per mangiare in erba (Tamaro, 1892).

Bushy, short-stemmed plant; small dark leaves, sinuate, dentate. Fruit long, slender, cylindrical, dark green, dotted with white; orangeish at maturity, lightly reticulated. A very early variety and very productive. Excellent for eating when young (Tamaro, 1892).

The word quarantina means approx. 40 and is often used to refer to days; there are other vegetables with this descriptor, such as broccoli rapini quarantina and patata quarantina violetta, and thus the 40 refers to the number of days from planting to harvest (Elia and Santamaria, 2013). The quarantina vera nana was early maturing, in part because it was harvested when the fruits were young, and was vera nana, a true dwarf, a short-stemmed, bushy plant.

Aloi (1899), in his Trattato di agraria redatto, mentioned two cultivars of summer squash. One was the zucca italiana, the fruits of which were eaten when very young and called zucchettine, and the other was the zucchetta nana di Milano.

DISCUSSION

Five categories of historical records of Cucurbita from Renaissance times have been enumerated (Paris, 2000b). These are accounts by explorers, illustrations in botanical works, descriptions by botanists, artistic paintings and gardening books. Another category of historical records, which has not been thoroughly searched until now, is cookbooks. Pumpkins and squash are widely consumed as cooked vegetables, but the numerous cultigens of C. pepo vary greatly in their properties, some being better adapted to particular culinary preparations than others. The climate of Italy is highly favourable for pumpkin and squash production. As old landraces of pumpkins and cocozelles have been found in Italy (Perrino et al., 1988; Paris, 2001) and, as their Italian names suggest, two C. pepo cultivar-groups, Cocozelle and Zucchini, originated in Italy (Paris, 2000b), it seems quite likely that old Italian cookbooks could offer supplementary, new information about the history of C. pepo.

Although the old Italian cookery texts offer an improved insight into the historical development, dissemination and use of Cucurbita in Italy, it is often difficult to make a clear assessment of the information contained therein. There was a profusion of regional dialects spoken throughout Italy well into the 20th century. When the Kingdom of Italy was unified in 1861, Standard Italian was declared the official language of the country, but fewer than 10 % of Italians could actually speak it (Maiden, 1995). Most Italians, even of the educated and upper classes, spoke regional dialects descended from the Latin vernacular, a result of centuries of social, political and geographical fragmentation. Standard Italian traces its roots to the 14th century, derived from the blend of Tuscan dialects used by Dante and other Renaissance poets. Only after the Second World War, with the advent of public education and the spread of radio and television, did Standard Italian become understood and used throughout Italy (Migliorini, 1966, 1978). Moreover, the Italians have long had a flair for the use of suffixes as descriptors. Given that dialects prevailed in the country until the Second World War, it is not surprising that the cookbook authors were not consistent in their terminologies, including the use of diminutives.

The Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (Battaglia, 2002) lists the first mention of the word zucchino (masc. sing.) in print as 1875. It dates zucchina (fem. sing.) to 1879, citing the Tommaseo Dizionario della Lingua Italiana volume 4. The masculine and feminine plurals are zucchini and zucchine, respectively. The earliest written documents we have found that contain the diminutive word zucchini (or zucchine) are a Tuscan botanical dictionary dated 1809 and Tuscan cookbooks dating to the mid-19th century. The oldest of the Tuscan cookbooks are the 1844 edition of Il cuciniere italiano (Vignozzi, 1844), La cuciniera moderna (Brizzi, 1845) and Il cuciniere moderno (Puppo, 1849) (Table 1). Also mentioning zucchini were the Tuscan cookbooks by Oliva (1867) (published in Milan, but first published in Livorno) and Moro (1871). A book on economic botany (Tassi, 1865) and a research paper (Cazzuola, 1878), both published in Tuscany, also refer to zucchini.

The use by Artusi (1891) of the word zucchini rather than zucchette is indicative of his preference for the Tuscan dialect that was becoming the lingua franca of Italy. A native of Emiglia-Romagna, he wrote his cookbook in his adopted Standard Italian and included a glossary of Italian terms for his readers across the country. As Tuscan dialect words were considered to be ‘purer’ than terms from other Italian dialects, they tended to supersede them in Standard Italian. Indeed, the Tuscan word zucchini superseded the various other Italian words for squash and gourds by about 1875.

However, there is considerable doubt concerning the actual horticultural identity of the zucchini mentioned in these 19th-century cookbooks. Indeed, recipes by Oliva (1867) and Nelli (1880) call for the frying of the young fruit with its attached flower. Many cocozelle cultivars have persistent flowers but zucchini cultivars do not (Fig. 6). Cocozelles had been consumed, together with their attached flowers, for centuries (Paris and Janick, 2005).

The Tuscan word zucchini, its later French equivalent courgette and perhaps its predecessor, the Neapolitan cocozelle, were originally generalists from which specific elite types became heralded: zucchini and courgette with uniformly cylindrical, usually dark green fruits, and cocozelle with very long bulbous cylindrical fruits, broadly dark-striped or of a lighter green. Use of these diminutives tacitly indicated a preference for long fruits (Table 1). Frugoli (1638) specified long, tender cocuzzette, Cavalcanti (1839) long cocozzelle, Gallo (1880) indicated the preference for the cuccuzzedda, and Artusi (1891) and Ratto (1893) specified the long zucchini. The preference for long fruits is also implied by the diminutives of edible zucca, long-fruited bottle gourd, zuccolle/li in the early works by di Messisbugo (1549) and Stefani (1662). Similarly, the word zucchette, employed by Corrado (1781, 1786), Odescalchi (1834), Chapusot (1851), Belloni (1890), and Bossi and Salvi (1894) usually indicated elongate squash. In contrast, the double diminutives zucchettine/i (Tanara, 1644; Corrado, 1781, 1786; Vignozzi, 1822; Belloni, 1890; Bossi and Salvi, 1894) and zuccottini (Vialardi, 1854, 1899; Nelli, 1880) indicated fruits that were either even smaller and younger or shorter and rounder. The French diminutive courgeron (Vilmorin, 1856, 1883, 1904), for a small pumpkin to be used immature, such as ‘Courgeron de Genève’, is the equivalent of the Italian zucchettine and zuccottini. The numerous round-fruited Italian cultivars and landraces, such as ‘Tondo Chiaro di Toscana’ (Fig. 7E), and perhaps even the vegetable marrows, such as ‘Bolognese’ (Fig. 7I), would have been included with these (Paris, 2001).

The word quarantina, the use of the fruit when it is young, the compact plant, its productivity and the association with Milan connect the description by Cantoni (1855) of Zucca quarantina with the one by Tamaro (1892) of Zucca quarantina vera nana. However, the word quarantina (40-day) was used to indicate early maturity in other crop plants, and its variants could have been used for summer squash other than zucchini. For example, a publication by the Ministry of Agriculture (1879) mentioned Di Napoli o di quaranta giorni (Naples or 40-day) squash, suggesting a cocozelle (Fig. 7A, B, D), and a Sicilian monograph on garden vegetables includes Cucuzza di 40 giorni (Gallo 1880), which was probably a summer pumpkin (Fig. 7E). Cantoni, though, distinguished the verde e lunga (cocozelle) and the zucca bianca tonda (pumpkin) from the zucca verde quarantina. Cantoni devoted a lengthy description to the zucca verde quarantina, stating that it was highly productive, for marketing when the fruit was still small, the plant spreading very little and needing no pruning. The description by Tamaro of the quarantina vera nana is similar but more detailed, clearly indicating a zucchini squash; he stated that the plant was short-stemmed and compact, yielding long, slender, cylindrical, dark green fruits (Fig. 7J, K). Apparently, Cantoni and Tamaro were describing the same cultivar, suggesting that a zucchini has existed since at least as early as 1855. The verde quarantina was also known to the Piedmontese Francesco Re (1881). A zucca quarantina was the only one treated by Alessandra Canevari (1883) of Milan, but Farneti (1892) did not mention it, his treatment of Cucurbita pepo being briefer than of C. maxima, in stark contrast to other Italian books on horticulture and cookery. As regards the 1891 catalogue of Fratelli Ingegnoli, the description of nana di Milano as a bush cultivar is contemporary to Tamaro’s zucca quarantina vera nana. The accompanying image, copied by Aloi (1899) for zucchetta nana di Milano, is not a true representation. Even to the present, commercial seed outlets use attractive photographs to escort their descriptions of cultivars, but often the photographs are in fact takes of other cultivars. ‘Nano Verde di Milano’ is still offered by Fratelli Ingegnoli (Fig. 7K) and the Come si cucinano i legumi (Ingegnoli, 1895) is the first cookbook that mentions a zucchini, nano di Milano, by name.

The combined Italian culinary and horticultural records reveal that zucchini, both the word and the vegetable, trace their origins to mid-19th-century northern Italy. However, the word and the vegetable came into common use independently of each other. As Standard Italian gradually took hold throughout the country during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the various dialect terms were replaced by zucchini. Today, although Italian seed companies list summer squash as zucchino, they readily single out the zucchini ‘Nano Verde di Milano’ (Fig. 7J, K) for its dark skin and cylindrical shape, the cocozelles ‘San Pasquale’ and ‘Striato d’Italia’ (Fig. 7A, B, D) for their very young fruits, the cocozelles ‘Romanesco’ and ‘Alberello Sel. Valery’ (Fig. 7F, G) for their flowers, and the summer pumpkins (Fig. 7E) for stuffing.

The association of the word zucchini with a particular fruit-shape group of squash arose in California, USA during the early 20th century. The word zucchini entered the American seed trade, and the equivalent courgette in the British seed trade, for squash of uniformly cylindrical fruit shape and intense green colour: the descendants or close relatives of quarantina vera nana or ‘Nano Verde di Milano’ (Fig. 7J, K). The shorter, less intensely coloured vegetable marrows (Fig. 7I) were frowned upon as inferior (Higgins and Day, 1983; Higgins and Evans, 1985; Tesi, 1987; Nencini and Tesi, 1991). Toward the end of the 20th century, large commercial outlets began offering new cultivars bearing round fruits that were to be consumed when young. Instead of reviving the by-then obsolete words zucchettine, zuccotini and courgeron, the paradoxical descriptor ‘round zucchini’ was invented for these fruits. This led to a general usage of the word zucchini for all young fruits of Cucurbita pepo, essentially as a synonym for the long-established term summer squash and beyond, to young fruits of other cucurbit species.

All of the traditional true zucchini cultivars have intense green external coloration of the young fruits (Figs 2, 6 and 7J, K) which turns black-green at full maturity (Fig. 3). This developmental coloration of the fruits is conferred by the unique interaction of complementary dominant alleles, L-1 and L-2 (Paris and Nerson, 1986), at two multiple-allelic loci (Paris, 2009). Relatively few accessions of other groups possess both of these alleles, the l-1 locus having five alleles and the l-2 locus four alleles identified so far. It is evident, though, that the zucchini squash was selected from an ancestor that carried both alleles, L-1 and L-2. The Italian cocozelles carry other alleles at the l-1 locus, most commonly l-1^BSt (broad, contiguous stripes) (Figs 6 and 7A, B, D, F, G) and sometimes l-1 (light-coloured, no stripes) (Figs 2, 3 and 7H) (Paris, 2000c). This indicates that the cocozelles and zucchinis are derived from different ancestors. DNA sequence polymorphisms have yet to reveal a possible candidate forebear of the zucchini (Katzir et al., 2000; Ferriol et al., 2003; Paris et al., 2003, 2015; Formisano et al., 2012; Gong et al., 2012). Indeed, these investigations show that the cocozelles are not more closely related to the zucchinis than are the pumpkins or the vegetable marrows. The two cultivar-groups, Cocozelle and Zucchini, evolved separately, the former in Naples and probably other parts of southern and central Italy long prior to 1811, and the latter in northern Italy, near Milan, during the 19th century.

No native North American landraces of Cucurbita pepo subsp. pepo true-breeding for longfruitedness have been described (Zhiteneva, 1930). Instead, these landraces bear fruits that are generally round, ranging from oblate to short oblong, probably differing little from those grown in pre-Columbian times (Whitaker and Knight, 1980). Generally, the landraces are multipurpose, cultivated for the consumption of the young fruits, the mature fruit flesh and the seeds. Consequently, the advantage imparted by longer, narrower shape for consuming the young fruits is offset by the greater number and larger seeds produced by round fruits (Nerson et al., 2000; Nerson, 2005). Simple sequence repeat and HFO–TAG DNA polymorphisms indicate that the long-fruited squash cultigens of C. pepo subsp. pepo were derived from spontaneous crossing of (more or less round-fruited) pumpkins originating from eastern North America with those originating from southern North America, shortly after their arrival in Europe (Gong et al., 2012; Paris et al., 2015). Both the eastern and the southern pumpkins were introduced to Italy by no later than 1518 (Janick and Paris, 2006). Italians had by then a 1500 year long culinary tradition of using young, very elongate cucurbit fruits in cookery, especially bottle gourds, Lagenaria siceraria (Janick et al., 2007). Italian gardeners probably jumped at the opportunity, as soon as it presented itself, to select the long-fruited variants that would have been produced by spontaneous wide crossing among C. pepo pumpkins from disparate geographical regions. As evidenced by Aldrovandi's watercolours and Campi's painting The Fruit Seller, the Italians were quite successful in selecting for elongate fruits before the close of the 16th century. Jean Bauhin (1541–1613), in his Historia Plantarum Universalis (Bauhin, 1651) described Cucurbita aspero folio flore luteo, semiarcus in morem intorta virente celebris, maculatáve (Paris, 2000b) which Duchesne equated with his 1775 painting, no. 93n, showing a very long, striped cocozelle (Paris, 2007) closely resembling ‘Striato d’Italia’ (Fig. 7D). Duchesne illustrated the mature fruits of two other cocozelle cultivars in 1770 (Paris, 2000a). Longstanding and consistent preference for the use of the long young fruits is indicated by Italian cookbooks (Frugoli, 1638; Leonardo, 1790; Odescalchi, 1834; Cavalcanti, 1839; Oliva, 1867; Nelli, 1880; Artusi, 1891).

The promiscuity of Cucurbita pepo, however, would have hindered the isolation and maintenance of the purity of elongate-fruited germplasm by Italian farmers. Most growers would have saved seeds from year to year without being able to isolate their crops adequately, or without knowing they should. Or perhaps, given their longstanding experience with maintaining the purity of long-fruited bottle gourds, despite the presence in the vicinity of the conspecific bottle-shaped bottle gourds, Italian farmers had appreciated the need for isolation of their choice selections. By the latter half of the 18th century, Koelreuter (1766) and Duchesne (1786) had shown experimentally that cultigens of C. pepo were apt to cross freely with one another. Perhaps long before that time, some Italian growers had become aware of this empirically and tried to keep individual cultivars separate to prevent cross-pollination and maintain varietal purity. Certainly, the horticulturist Filippo Re (1811) understood the need to isolate plants whose seeds were intended for future crops. He wrote: ‘The zucche more than most other vegetables are subject to hybridizing, that is spurious fertilization, through the application of seminal dust…and so it is strongly recommended to keep different kinds divided and far apart so they don’t become altered.’ Evidently, distinct varieties of Cucurbita existed before the beginning of the 19th century. The seed industry, though, was but in its infancy, only beginning its role of maintaining and selling pure seed stocks.

Until named cultigens were developed, true to type and dependably reproduced, cooks had to adapt their methods of preparing young squash according to what was available. Pre-Renaissance texts discuss and illustrate young, long bottle gourds for culinary use. Renaissance and post-Renaissance texts indicate that the young, long- and round-fruited Cucurbita were established as culinary items well before the emergence of the zucchini (Paris, 2000b) (Table 1). The cocozelle was the common, typical squash of Italy during the 19th century, being referred to by French writers as the Coucourzelle or Courge d’Italie (Mérault, 1827; Jacobsohn, 2005) and by Italian writers as Coccozzelli or Coconzelli (Re, 1811), zucca da estate or Coccozzelli (Pichat, 1866), zucca lungha d’Italia (Farneti, 1892) and zucca d’Italia (Tamaro, 1892) (Table 2). Italian cookbooks published in the north, especially Tuscany, referred to zucchini, though without descriptions or illustrations one can only speculate as to the horticultural identity of these squash. In recipes expressly calling for young fruits with their flowers attached (Oliva, 1867; Nelli, 1880), it is likely that cocozelles were intended (Fig. 6). Otherwise, from a cook’s perspective, cocozelle and zucchini are interchangeable for most purposes, and cookbooks did not often discriminate between them. The books written by agricultural scientists Cantoni (1855) and Tamaro (1892) did distinguish between cocozelle and zucchini, and indicate that the zucchini became established in the environs of Milan during the mid-19th century.

CONCLUSIONS

1. Pumpkins and squash, Cucurbita species, were introduced into Italian kitchens by no later than the mid-16th century. Both young and mature fruits of Cucurbita were used in Italian kitchens at this time.

2. By the early 17th century, both elongate and round young fruits of Cucurbita pepo had entered Italian kitchens as separate culinary items.

3. By the middle of the 17th century, culinary use of the young elongate fruits of Cucurbita pepo had largely replaced the use of young elongate bottle gourds, Lagenaria siceraria.

4. By the 18th century, cocozelle squash, Cucurbita pepo subsp. pepo Cocozelle Group, became established in the environs of Naples, and a particular extant cultivar, ‘San Pasquale’, was named by 1811, after a Neapolitan neighbourhood.

5. The first usage in literature of the word zucchini/e that we found dates to 1809 and refers to small, mature, dry bottle gourds, Lagenaria siceraria, that were used for storing tobacco.

6. Italian cookbooks dating from 1844 use the word zucchini to indicate a culinary item. This word was first used in Tuscany and then spread to other parts of Italy.

7. The similar descriptions of zucca verde quarantina and zucca quarantina vera nana in the agricultural books by Cantoni (1855) and Tamaro (1892), respectively, indicate that the Cucurbita pepo subsp. pepo Zucchini Group originated in the environs of Milan during the mid-19th century. Similarly, the verde quarantina mentioned by Francesco Re (1881) and the nana di Milano in the 1891 catalogue of Fratelli Ingegnoli probably refer to the zucchini.

8. The word zucchini in reference to squash and the Cucurbita pepo cultivar-group Zucchini originated concurrently but independently. As Standard Italian became used throughout Italy in the second half of the 19th century, the word zucchini displaced the older dialect terms that had been in use for various young squash. Today the word zucchini is used in Italy much as the term summer squash is used in American English.

9. The word zucchini was imported to the USA together with a uniformly cylindrical, intensely coloured squash deriving from Milan, not long before 1918. In the USA and elsewhere outside of Italy, the word zucchini then came to signify exclusively uniformly cylindrical, intensely coloured squash.

10. The pumpkin ancestors of the zucchini squash were transported from the New World to the Old World shortly after 1492. They interacted in the Old World and, over the course of four centuries, evolved into a new, elite horticultural type. This new, elite squash then returned to the land of its pumpkin ancestors with the Italian name zucchini.