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VEGETABLE MARROW, FRIED IN BATTER (another way)
Peel two small marrows and cut them into quarters, carefully removing the seeds. Drop each piece into a good batter (see BATTER FOR FRYING); have ready a saucepan of boiling fat, with the frying basket in it, drop in the pieces of marrow and fry them a golden brown; drain them very carefully, and serve in a very hot dish. Probable cost, 2d. to 4d. each.
A straightforward deep-fry, but written for a vegetable most modern cooks meet only as an overgrown courgette. The batter cooks far faster than a raw quarter of marrow, which is where this recipe needs attention.
- What a marrow isA vegetable marrow is a summer squash left on the plant to mature — essentially a large courgette (zucchini), pale green-striped, with a soft skin and a seedy core. The recipe specifies "two small marrows" and gives no weight; larger, older fruits tend to be watery and cottony and are usually better stuffed and baked.
- Cut smaller than quarteredA quarter of even a small marrow is too thick to cook through before the batter darkens. Cut the peeled, seeded flesh into fingers about 3 in long and 1/2 in thick, or parboil the quarters for two or three minutes and dry them thoroughly first.
- Draw out the waterMarrow is largely water and will steam inside its batter jacket. Salt the cut pieces lightly, leave 20 minutes, then press dry in a cloth. Wet flesh also makes the batter slide off in the fat.
- Fat temperatureThe book's cue is visual: fat hot enough to brown the batter at once. In modern terms this corresponds roughly to 350-375F. Below that the batter absorbs grease; above it the coating colours before the marrow softens. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- The frying basketBattered pieces stick to a wire basket and tear. Lower them in with a spider or slotted spoon and use the basket only for lifting them out, or line the draining stage with a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
- The batterThe cross-reference is to the book's own frying batter, which is not reproduced on this page; period frying batters are typically flour with egg and milk or water. A thin coating batter, near the consistency of pouring cream, suits marrow better than a thick one.
- Cost and yield"2d. to 4d. each" is pre-decimal pence, apparently per marrow, and is a period price note rather than an instruction. The recipe gives no yield; two small marrows quartered make eight pieces.
- ServingServe at once on a hot dish, as the recipe directs. It collapses within minutes of leaving the fat, so fry last.
Vegetable marrows entered British kitchen gardens in the nineteenth century and were, by the end of the century, productive and cheap enough that cookery writers seem to have looked for ways to use them — boiled, stuffed, in soup, in jam with ginger, and fried in batter as here. Cassell's gives more than one method for the fritter, which is why this page is headed "another way"; that phrasing recurs in the Dictionary, which appears to have been assembled as a reference work of variants rather than a single set of tested recipes. Frying in a deep pan of fat with a wire basket was, by this period, one domestic method among others, and the insistence on very careful draining and a very hot dish may reflect a wider unease of the age: greasy fried food was often taken as evidence of a badly run kitchen.