Bottle gourd

Appearance

The fresh fruit has a light green smooth skin and a white flesh. Rounder varieties are called calabash gourds. They come in a variety of shapes, they can be huge and rounded, or small and bottle shaped, or slim and more than a meter long.

The calabash was one of the first cultivated plants in the world, grown not primarily for food, but for use as a water container. The bottle gourd may have been carried from Africa to Asia, Europe and the Americas in the course of human migration. It shares its common name with that of the calabash tree (Crescentia cujete).

Uses

Calabash had been cultivated in Asia, Europe and the Americas for thousands of years before Columbus's discovery of America. Historically, in Europe, Walahfrid Strabo (808–849), abbot and poet from Reichenau, advisor to the Carolingian kings, discussed it in his Latin Hortulus as one of the 23 plants of an ideal garden.

Recent research indicates some can have an African origin and at least two unrelated domestications: one 8–9 thousand years ago, based on the analysis of archeological samples found in Asia, a second, four thousand years ago, traced from archeological discoveries in Egypt.

The mystery of the calabash – namely that this African or Eurasian species was being grown in America over 8000 years ago – came about from the difficulty in understanding how it came to be on the American continent. Genetic research on archeological samples published by the National Academy of Sciences in December 2005 suggests calabash may have been domesticated earlier than food crops and livestock, and, like dogs, were brought into the New World at the end of the ice age by Paleo-Indians. It is supposed that bottle gourds were carried by people in boats or on foot across the then-existing land bridge between Asia and America. Once in Florida and Mexico, bottle gourd seeds could still be viable after long periods of migration.

The rind of the domesticated calabash, unlike that of its wild counterpart, is thick and waterproof. Calabash previously was thought to have spread across oceans without human intervention, if the seeds were still able to germinate even after long periods at sea. This was the basis of the earlier, dominating theory, which proposed the calabash had drifted across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to North and South America. The new research notes domestication had led to changes in morphology (shape) of Asian and African specimens, potentially allowing the identification of the calabash from different areas. Now, both genetic and morphological considerations show calabash found in American archaeological finds are closer to Asian calabash variants than to African ones.