Don’t you find it remarkable that after 12,000 years of agriculture, the same questions keep cropping up (pardon the pun)? Is a strawberry a fruit? Is a pea a vegetable? Is a potato a root vegetable? And does it really matter, as long as you eat them all up?
This week I was introduced to an expression I’d never heard before, involving that other perennial enigma, the gourd. “I’m bored out of my gourd.” I’m familiar with other foodie synonyms for the head, like swede and melon, but gourd was a new one on me. I like a rhyme, and “bored out my gourd” is pleasing in a way that “bored out of my head” isn’t. So I feel enriched.
But gourd is a word that has never really been embraced on a wide scale. It makes an appearance in The Life of Brian: “Cast off the shoes and follow the gourd… the Holy Gourd of Jerusalem!” I happen to have a friend, Derek, who has that surname too, presumably because his ancestors dealt in gourds. Or maybe it was originally Gawd! He is a West Ham fan.
But apart from Derek and The Life of Brian, you don’t come across the word ‘gourd’ very often. It is given to crop plants in the family Cucurbitaceae, it says here. Of the two, gourd gets my vote. “Follow the Holy Cucurbitaceae of Jerusalem!” wouldn’t have been as funny. And Cucurbitaceae wouldn’t fit on the back of a West Ham shirt. All together now, “Give us a C…”
Within the Gourd family you have the pumpkin, the squash, the melon, the cucumber and Derek… all sorts of hard-skinned fruits with soft, fleshy innards. There are various inedible gourds too, which are still useful for hollowing out and using as a vessel, just like the Holy Gourd of Jerusalem.
You might not regard any of these things as fruits because they don’t taste fruity but botanically speaking they are, because they develop from a flower and contain seeds. The strawberry is also a fruit, it’s just not a berry. Whereas a banana is. So is an avocado. And a pomegranate, even though it looks like it might be a gourd.
But there is all sorts of confusion as to which gourd belongs to what and why, so let me clear this up once and for all. The pumpkin is a squash which is a gourd. The melon is a gourd but not a squash. The cucumber is neither a melon nor a squash, but it is a gourd. Derek used to play squash and he has a melon but he is not a cucumber.
So now you know. Where’s my invitation to present Gardener’s World?
