The Gastrographer
Mapping Culinary History
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Journey Point Map Key
Zucchini
Cucurbita pepo var. cylindrica
🌍Origin
Mesoamerican Highlands, Oaxaca & Southern Mexico — c. 8000 BCE
🌱Domestication
The zucchini is, in the strictest sense, a New World plant given an Old World form, and its deep ancestry lies far from the kitchen gardens of Lombardy with which it is now identified. Its wild forebears belong to Cucurbita pepo, a squash first taken into cultivation in the highlands of Mesoamerica around 8000 BCE, amongst the earliest of all the domesticated plants of the Americas. Rind fragments and charred seeds recovered from the dry cave sites of the Oaxaca valley, notably Guilá Naquitz, place squash alongside the bottle gourd at the very beginning of American agriculture, a thousand years and more before maize was tamed. The earliest growers did not prize the plant for its watery flesh, which in the wild forms was thin and bitter, but for its seeds, which are rich in oil and protein and could be dried and stored against the lean season, and for the hard, durable rinds of the mature fruit, which served as bowls, scoops, and containers. Over the following millennia the cultivators of Mesoamerica selected this single, endlessly plastic species into a great range of forms, from sweet autumn pumpkins to acorn and crookneck squashes, and squash took its place as the third member of the Three Sisters, the milpa polyculture in which it was sown together with maize and beans. The arrangement was a masterpiece of agronomic logic: the maize stood tall as a living trellis, the beans climbed it and fixed nitrogen into the soil, and the broad, sprawling leaves of the squash shaded the ground between, suppressing weeds and holding the moisture in the earth. Yet the slender green vegetable we now call zucchini did not exist in the Americas at all. It was bred from C. pepo stock only after the plant crossed the Atlantic, the work of European, and above all Italian, gardeners who selected for a long, thin-skinned, mild-fleshed fruit eaten immature, before the seeds hardened and the rind toughened. So thoroughly was the squash naturalised in its new home that one of its parts was embraced almost at once: the golden blossom, the fiore di zucca, was prized long before the modern fruit was perfected, and within a generation of the squash reaching Italy the flowers were being stuffed with ricotta and anchovy, sheathed in a light batter, and fried in the kitchens of Rome and Naples, in a preparation that has scarcely altered to this day.
⛵Global Voyage
The squash crossed the Atlantic with the first returning ships of the Columbian Exchange, reaching the Iberian Peninsula in the opening decades of the sixteenth century along with maize, beans, tomatoes, and chillies. In Spain its welcome was cool: the Cucurbita pepo squash was grown more as a curiosity, an ornament, or a fodder for livestock than as a dish for the table, and the Spanish, well supplied with their own gourds, were slow to take it into their cooking. The more receptive kitchens lay further east, in the lands of the Ottoman Empire and the eastern Mediterranean, where the summer squash was embraced with an enthusiasm that Iberia never showed. Ottoman cooks took kabak into the great repertoire of dolma and meze, hollowing and stuffing it with spiced rice and herbs, and the cooks of Ottoman Syria and the Levant developed the pale, slender, tender-walled variety they called kousa, the foundation of kousa mahshi, the stuffed marrow that became an emblem of Levantine home cooking. Across the Aegean, Greek cooks grated it into the fritters called kolokithokeftedes, and in the Maghreb it slipped into the tagine and the couscous pot. It was in Italy, however, that the squash was most thoroughly transformed, and it was the southern kitchens that moved first. Neapolitan cooks sliced and fried the elongated zucca lunga in olive oil and steeped it in vinegar and mint in the manner called alla scapece, a technique descended from the ancient Roman practice of preserving fried fish and vegetables in acid, whilst in Rome the blossoms were battered and fried in a tradition rooted in the Jewish quarter. From these southern beginnings the cultivation of the long summer squash travelled up the peninsula through Liguria and into the Po valley, where it met the patient, decades-long work of selection that would at last produce the vegetable we know. The modern zucchini was born not in the milpa of Mexico but in the kitchen gardens of Lombardy: the market gardeners of Milan bred, over many seasons, a consistently slender, dark-green, thin-skinned cultivar at its sweetest and most tender when cut young, and by approximately 1880 this variety was being listed in Milanese seed catalogues under the name zucchino, 'little gourd', the diminutive plural of which, zucchini, would conquer the English-speaking world. From Lombardy the new cultivar set out on its final voyages. Italian emigrants carried its seed across the Atlantic to the United States, to Brazil, and to Australia in the great migrations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, planting it in the market gardens of Brooklyn, the interior of São Paulo, and the truck farms of Victoria, and giving the English-speaking New World its word, zucchini. The same vegetable reached Britain by an entirely separate path, through French rather than Italian channels: French gardeners had named the long green squash courgette, the diminutive of courge, and it was under that French name that Elizabeth David introduced it to British readers after the Second World War. This double transmission, Italian to the Americas and French to Britain, is the reason a single plant from Oaxaca is eaten today under two different names on opposite shores of one ocean.
🍽Modern Culinary Role
Zucchini belongs above all to the great tradition of cucina povera, the resourceful poor kitchen of the Italian south and the eastern Mediterranean, where its very abundance was at once its virtue and its difficulty. A single healthy plant fruits prolifically through the whole of summer, setting far more than any household can eat before each tender green finger swells into a watery, club-sized marrow and loses its delicate flavour, and it is this relentless surplus that has driven cooks to such inventiveness with it. The vegetable is sliced and slow-fried with garlic and basil into a sauce for pasta, as in the Neapolitan pasta alla Nerano with its melting Provolone del Monaco; it is puréed into the silky basil-scented crema di zucchine of Lombardy; it is grated and bound with feta, dill, and mint into Greek fritters; it is stuffed in the Levantine and Ottoman manner; and, where all else fails, it is grated into the sweet, spiced quick bread with which American cooks dispose of the August glut. What is most remarkable about the zucchini's long journey is that it was genuinely reinvented in each place it arrived rather than merely translated, transformed every time according to the inner logic of the local kitchen: stuffed and simmered in the Levant, fried and soured in Naples, slow-stewed into ratatouille in Provence, battered into feather-light tempura in Japan, and tempered with cumin and mustard seed into a dry sabzi in the cities of northern India. Today it is grown on every inhabited continent and ranks amongst the most widely cultivated vegetables on earth, with great commercial production in China, India, Turkey, and throughout the Mediterranean basin, and it is prized in the modern kitchen for its lightness, its low calorie count, and its willingness to take on almost any flavour. Yet its cultural heartland remains where it was perfected, in the kitchen gardens of Lombardy and the trattorie of Rome, the place where a squash from the highlands of Oaxaca was given a diminutive Italian name and sent out to the rest of the world as though it had always been Italian.