Here's an article from Southern Living on squash vs. gourds. We eat squash, we use gourds--or we used to. Yellow summer squash provides much of the favorite cuisine of the American South. It has this sweet buttery taste that adapts to so many recipes. Squash casserole is a favorite dish among Southerners. As quite a few squash and gourd varieties are native here, they grow like weeds. Harvests are abundant. I guess zucchini is a European squash. It also grows like weeds here and is quite popular. Perhaps the Italians got it from us. They appropriated the tomato. Gourds, which are generally not edible, used to be used in rural areas mostly as dippers at cisterns and for things like storage containers. Here's the article: https://www.southernliving.com/garden/is-a-pumpkin-a-gourd
How interesting, thank you! It seems like the article differentiates squash and gourds as being edible and generally inedible. I guess perhaps the word 'gourd' is used in a different way here?
Gourds are really important here in the American South. For eating and for holding water.
That's so interesting! Which varieties are most popular there?
Here's an article from Southern Living on squash vs. gourds. We eat squash, we use gourds--or we used to. Yellow summer squash provides much of the favorite cuisine of the American South. It has this sweet buttery taste that adapts to so many recipes. Squash casserole is a favorite dish among Southerners. As quite a few squash and gourd varieties are native here, they grow like weeds. Harvests are abundant. I guess zucchini is a European squash. It also grows like weeds here and is quite popular. Perhaps the Italians got it from us. They appropriated the tomato. Gourds, which are generally not edible, used to be used in rural areas mostly as dippers at cisterns and for things like storage containers. Here's the article: https://www.southernliving.com/garden/is-a-pumpkin-a-gourd
How interesting, thank you! It seems like the article differentiates squash and gourds as being edible and generally inedible. I guess perhaps the word 'gourd' is used in a different way here?
Probably so. Yet they are the same family of plant.