Edible Implements

Gourds and squashes are so handy in the kitchen, you’d think that would be enough. Take the Chinese silk gourd (si gua). You can boil it, fry it or pickle it; you can stew it or stuff it; you can throw it into a salad or puree it into soup. In short, you can treat it in all the same ways as zucchini, which it resembles in flavor and texture, and a few more--such as turning its seeds into a kind of tofu.

If you let it ripen fully, though, it doesn’t just grow big and coarse, it gets violently bitter. But instead of putting it on your neighbor’s porch in the middle of the night, as people have been known to do with zucchini, you can skin it, scrape out the flesh and seeds and use the spongy structure that remains like a dishcloth or bath sponge. The silk gourd is simply the immature form of luffa, the well-known “vegetable sponge.” Botanists call it Luffa aegyptica.

By the way, the fibrous network of a luffa may look like a sort of skeleton, but it’s actually more like vegetable arteries. It’s composed of vascular bundles, which are the tubes which in life carried water and nutrients around the gourd.

Lagenaria siceraria, known under names like opo (China), lauki (India), yugao (Japan), cucuzzi (Italy) and calabash, is also eaten in most of the same ways as silk gourd, including that gourd seed tofu business, and one unique way. Makizushi, the familiar “sushi roll” rolled up using a little mat of bamboo slivers (makisu), is supposed to include an ingredient called kanpyo, which is dried strips of yugao; gourd jerky, as it were. Moistened, reconstituted kanpyo “strings” are also used for tying up little bundles of food on the plate.

But another name of this gourd is “bottle gourd,” because it dries hard and woody, and you can use it as a sort of organic bottle with a longish neck and a globular body. You can turn it into a calabash pipe, or you might even carry some of that gourd seed tofu in it.