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Vegetable Marrow, Fried in Batter
Pare and quarter the marrows, and boil them in the usual way for ten minutes, or until they are three-parts cooked. Drain them, sprinkle a little pepper and salt upon them, cut them into slices, dip into frying batter, and fry in hot fat till brightly browned. Lift them on to a dish, sprinkle chopped parsley over them, and serve either alone or as an accompaniment to cooked meat. The frying batter may be made as follows. Put six ounces of flour into a bowl, mix a tea-spoonful of salt with it, and work it into a paste with a quarter of a pint of water. Add a table-spoonful of oil and the well-beaten yolk of one egg, and beat the paste till it is quite smooth. Let the batter stand in a cool place for an hour. A quarter of an hour before it is wanted add the whites of two eggs whisked to a firm froth.
A late-Victorian way with an overgrown summer squash: par-boil, batter, fry. The batter is a classic yeast-free pâte à frire, and the hour of resting is the part most likely to be skipped and most worth keeping.
- What a vegetable marrow isA mature Cucurbita pepo — essentially a courgette left to grow to 10-14 inches. An overgrown zucchini is the closest stand-in; pattypan or a young cushaw will do at a pinch, though neither is quite the same thing. Scoop out the seedy core of anything over about a pound; the recipe assumes you have pared and quartered, which exposes it.
- Imperial measuresSix ounces of flour is about 1⅓ cups; a quarter of an imperial pint is 5 imperial fl oz, about 140 ml — a generous American half-cup rather than a level one. The batter should coat a spoon thickly before the whites go in — hold back a little water if your flour drinks less.
- The hinge: do not overboilTen minutes is generous for a watery squash. Take it out while it still has resistance at the centre; marrow that is fully cooked before it meets the batter will collapse into a wet pocket inside the crust.
- Dry it hardDraining is not enough. Spread the slices on a towel and blot both faces, then season. Surface moisture makes batter slide off and spits in the fat.
- Resting the batterThe hour in a cool place lets the gluten relax and the flour hydrate, which gives a lighter, less leathery crust. The whisked whites go in at the last moment and should be folded, not beaten, or the air is lost.
- Frying fatThe recipe says only 'hot fat'. For battered slices that means deep enough fat to float them, at around 350-365F on a modern thermometer. Fry in small batches; crowding drops the temperature and the batter absorbs oil instead of setting.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities for the marrow. The batter as written is generous — enough for a large marrow and probably more, serving four as a side dish.
The vegetable marrow was a fixture of the British kitchen garden by the middle of the nineteenth century — cheap, enormously productive, and forgiving of neglect, which made it a cottage and allotment crop as much as a gentleman's one. Its very blandness is why cookery writers of the period worked so hard at it, and here the marrow is disguised in a fried batter borrowed from the French repertoire. The batter itself — flour, water, oil and yolk rested for an hour, with whipped whites folded in at the end — is the standard pâte à frire of the classical kitchen, and its appearance in a general household dictionary shows how thoroughly French technique had filtered into English middle-class cooking by the time this book appeared. Serving fried vegetables "as an accompaniment to cooked meat" may suggest a practical habit of the era, though the recipe itself says no more than that.