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VEGETABLE MARROW IN WHITE SAUCE (another way)
Pare and quarter three good-sized vegetable marrows. Remove the seeds, cut the quarters into pieces about two inches long, and shape each piece in a point at the top and flat at the bottom. Boil until tender. Place them standing side by side on a hot dish, pour some good white sauce round them, and serve as hot as possible. Or after boiling, cut them into dice, and heat them up in some good white sauce. Time, about twenty minutes to boil the marrows. Sufficient for six persons. Probable cost of marrows, 2d. to 6d. each.
A plain Victorian vegetable course that lives or dies on how long the marrow spends in the water. Everything else is a béchamel and a bit of knife work.
- What a marrow isA vegetable marrow is a summer squash left to grow large — the same species as courgette/zucchini. Three good-sized ones is a lot of vegetable; two marrows of about 2 lb each, or four or five large courgettes, will serve six comfortably.
- Twenty minutes is too longTwenty minutes may be too long -- Mature marrow is mostly water and can collapse quickly. Start testing pieces of this size at around 10 minutes, cooking only until a knife point goes in with slight resistance, and drain at once; boiled too far, the pieces will not stand up on the dish.
- Drain hardThe single thing that ruins this dish is water thinning the sauce on the plate. Tip the pieces onto a clean cloth or a rack for a minute before plating, and warm the dish first.
- Salting firstNot in the original, but worth doing: salt the cut pieces for 20 minutes and pat dry. It seasons the flesh, which is bland, and draws out some liquid.
- "Good white sauce"A plain flour-and-butter white sauce: 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour, and roughly 1/2 pint (10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups) of milk, cooked out for a few minutes so it does not taste of raw flour. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg; a little of the marrow cooking water can replace some milk.
- The shapingPointed top, flat base, so the pieces stand upright in a ring with sauce poured around rather than over. It is presentation, not technique — the diced version at the end of the recipe is the same dish for a weeknight.
- Yield and costSix as a vegetable course alongside a roast, not as a main. The "2d. to 6d. each" is a period price note, and indicates marrows were an inexpensive vegetable.
Vegetable marrow held a peculiar place in British cookery: cheap, enormously productive in an allotment or kitchen garden, and so watery and mild that almost every recipe for it is really a recipe for what goes on top. A white sauce was a common dressing for boiled vegetables in the nineteenth-century English kitchen, following French practice. The instruction to trim each piece to a point and stand them upright reflects the service style of the period, when vegetables were sent to table as a distinct course and arranged with some care rather than spooned alongside the meat. Marrows belong to the Cucurbita squashes, which are native to the Americas and reached Europe from the sixteenth century onward; the British habit of growing them to great size, and of competing over that size at local shows, appears to be a nineteenth-century development.