Gourd Automaton

Recent activity in the garage has to do with making automaton. Automata are mechanical devices that span the gambit from toys to kinetic art. Mechanical toys were once a province of the wealthy who had time to be entertained and money to pay artisans to produce the devices. As manufacturing procedures became mechanized and materials became more inexpensive, hand-cranked items became more mainstream. See the blog in the links to the side, The Wheels of the Gourd. The process is explained fairly thoroughly. Yes, this project actually required a separate blog, and is still evolving into other automatons!

....and after some minor adjustments (described in the blog devoted to gourd automata), here is the movement...

Stone Soup, Who Knew?

Gourds are the inedible part of the squash family. A person can eat pumpkins and butternut squashes but not hard shell gourds, the kind from which bowls and jars are made. In fact, there are a LOT of recipes for gourd soups using the edible side of the squash family.

...and some called this a water gourd.

My favorite is the rustic, colonial dinners at Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. What I find surprising are the websites that describe a 'bottle neck gourd soup' made from a squash called doodhi or lauki, which looks like a butternut squash or a fat banana gourd actually. This is an example of how linguistics can mess with a gourding enthusiast's head.

In the gourding world, where hard shelled gourds are used to produce tools of utility or items of decoration, a bottle neck gourd looks like an hourglass. Usually they are made into birdhouses, or water bottles, or Santa Clauses, or all manner of things that take advantage of the pinched-in middle. Miniature bottle neck gourds are made into ornaments or doll heads or rattles.

Maru Toledo stirs her soup.

What came as complete, blow-me-out-of-the-water (or soup, as it were) was the information about gourd soup made IN a gourd with a blazing hot rock known as rock soup. At the Research Center for the Rescue of Oral Tradition and the Gastronomy of the Valles Region of Jalisco, colonial and prehistoric cooking includes a soup where ingredients are put into a gourd bowl, followed by a blazing hot basalt rock which makes the soup boil. Who knew? I found this blazin' amazin' and would like to try this myself at some point.

I have questions: is the gourd treated somehow? is the gourd reusable once the soup is made and eaten? how long does the rock cook the soup's ingredients? The website says the soup and the mushrooms could win culinary awards and, based on the ingredients used, I believe it! It makes me hungry just sitting here!

Cracklin' with hunger!
CAM