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Vegetable Marrow in White Sauce or Gravy
Boil a large marrow in the usual way. When three-parts cooked, take it up, cut it into squares, place these in a saucepan, and pour over them as much white sauce or thick brown gravy as will cover them. Let them heat gently. Serve in a vegetable-dish with the sauce poured over them. Time, fifteen to twenty-five minutes. Probable cost of marrows, 2d. to 6d. each. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A finishing method rather than a recipe proper: the marrow is boiled short of done, then warmed through in sauce so it takes up flavour instead of water. Two details decide whether it works — how far you undercook it, and how thick the sauce is.
- What a marrow isA vegetable marrow is a summer squash left to grow large — the same plant as courgette/zucchini. A zucchini allowed to reach 10-12 inches, or a pale green trombocino or similar, is the closest supermarket equivalent. Flesh is mild and very wet.
- "Boil in the usual way""Boil in the usual way" leaves the method to the reader. Period practice was to peel, halve lengthwise and scrape out the seeds and spongy core before simmering in salted water — though this recipe's own wording, boiling the marrow and only then cutting it into squares, implies it goes into the pot whole or in halves.
- Three-parts cookedThe hinge of the dish. Take it out while a knife still meets clear resistance, a few minutes short of tender depending on the size of the pieces. It finishes in the sauce, and marrow taken to fully tender in water then reheated turns to pulp.
- Drain hardMarrow is mostly water and will thin any sauce poured over it. Let the squares steam dry in the colander for several minutes, or spread them on a cloth, before saucing.
- The white sauceA period white sauce here is a plain flour-and-butter milk sauce — roughly 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour, half a pint of milk, seasoned with salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg (period books treat the richer béchamel as a separate thing). Make it slightly thicker than you want to eat it, since the marrow will release liquid.
- Thick brown gravyEither the kitchen's standing brown sauce — a browned roux let down with stock — or thickened gravy from a roast; the recipe does not specify. Any well-reduced beef or chicken stock thickened to coating consistency does the job.
- TimingThe fifteen to twenty-five minutes is not broken down, and may refer to the boiling alone. Once sauced, a few minutes over low heat is enough — it needs to be hot, not cooked further.
- Prices and yield2d. to 6d. each places marrows among the cheapest things in the greengrocer's. Three to four servings as a side dish.
Vegetable marrows were a nineteenth-century British enthusiasm: cheap, enormously productive in a cottage or allotment garden, and often grown for size as much as for eating. A big marrow is watery and nearly tasteless, so a sauce with some body to it was the usual remedy. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, aimed at middle-class households, is full of this kind of entry: a vegetable brought to the table respectably rather than interestingly, using whatever sauce the kitchen already had standing.