Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Edible Flowers guide to Squash Blossoms along with all the Squash Blossoms containing recipes presented on this site, with 0 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Cornish recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Squash Blossoms as a major edible flower.

Squashes, Cucurbita spp are a genus of flowering plants in the Cucurbitaceae (gourd) family first cultivated in the Americas and now naturalized and used as food plants world-wide. The genus includes species grown for their fruit and edible seeds (the squashes, pumpkins and marrows, and the chilacayote), as well as some species grown only as gourds. Cucurbita species are often used as food, either for their fruit or the seeds lying within. The winter varieties have thick, inedible skins, and so store well. They are also very sweet. Summer squash, on the other hand, have a very thin skin, which can be eaten. The seeds inside can be ground into a flour or meal, roasted and eaten whole, made into pumpkinseed oil, or otherwise prepared. Summer squashes, including young vegetable marrows (such as courgette [zucchini]) pattypan and yellow crookneck) are harvested during the growing season, while the skin is still soft and the fruit rather small; they are eaten almost immediately and require little to no cooking. Winter squashes (such as butternut, Hubbard, buttercup, ambercup, acorn, spaghetti squash and pumpkin) are harvested at maturity, generally the end of summer, cured to further harden the skin, and stored in a cool place for eating later. They generally require longer cooking time than summer squashes.

In addition to the fruit, other parts of the plant are edible. Squash seeds can be eaten directly, ground into paste, meal, "nut" butter, even a fine flour, or (particularly for hulless pumpkins) pressed for vegetable oil (e.g. bottle gourd, buffalo gourd, pumpkin seed and watermelon seed oils). The shoots, leaves, and tendrils can be eaten as greens. The blossoms are an important part of native American cooking and are also used in many other parts of the world. Both the male and female blossoms can be harvested pre or mid-flower. The English word "squash" derives from askutasquash (a green thing eaten raw), a word from the Narragansett language, which was documented by Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, in his 1643 publication: A Key Into the Language of America. Similar words for squash exist in related languages of the Algonquian family such as Massachusetts.

The main species of squash, where the fruit and the flowers can be eaten for food are: Cucurbita maxima (eg hubbard squash, buttercup squash); Cucurbita mixta (eg cushaw squash); Cucurbita moschata (eg butternut squash) and Cucurbita pepo (includes most pumpkins, acorn squash, summer squash, vegetable marrows and courgettes).