How Halloween horrors seeded the great gourd scare of 2020
But using gourds, the wider term for bulbous vine fruits of the Cucurbitaceae family, to symbolise heads has an older history. In India, ash-gourds have been used instead of human sacrifices for centuries. The ones kept outside homes to ward off evil often have crude faces painted on them. Gourds grow in most parts of the world and their often-imposing shapes and blandly adaptable flesh mean that societies have found many uses for them.
Gourds are used as masks and covers for more private regions. Dried gourds are used in musical instruments such as sitars and banjos. They are used as receptacles for water and foods, and this, in turn, gives them symbolic value. “The great significance of the gourd to many people is perhaps no better shown than by its prominence in their creation myths,” writes Charles Heiser in The Gourd Book. Many stories have gods or the earliest humans created and sheltered in gourds.
Winter gourds, like pumpkins, were particularly important as a food source that, if properly stored and not cut until needed, would stay good through barren cold months. The seeds of some varieties are eaten as snacks and pressed for a dark-green edible oil with an intense nutty taste. The Soopashastra, an early 16th-century Kannada food text, has a chapter devoted to dishes made from jackfruit and gourds.
The recipes range from simple soups and steamed pumpkin to an elaborate concoction of a whole gourd simmered in spiced curds. The cooked flesh of many Halloween pumpkins ends up in pumpkin pies or cakes.
