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Vegetable Marrow Sauce for Poultry
Pare and skin the marrows, and boil them till tender; then rub them through a sieve. Season the pulp with salt and cayenne, and thicken either with stock or with cream. Serve the sauce very hot.
A three-line Victorian purée sauce that depends almost entirely on how much water you drive out of the squash. The instructions are sound but assume a cook who knows marrow is mostly liquid.
- What a vegetable marrow isA large, mature summer squash of the same species as courgette/zucchini, common in British gardens and rare in American shops. Substitute two or three overgrown zucchini or a pale-fleshed summer squash of about 2 lb total; winter squash is too dense and sweet for this.
- Pare and skin, and seedOn a mature marrow the rind is tough and the central seed cavity is spongy and watery. Peel it, halve it lengthwise, and scrape out seeds and pith before cutting into chunks — the original takes this as understood.
- Boil it dry, not wetThe hinge of the dish. Marrow is largely water, so boil in very little salted water, or steam, then drain hard and press the pulp in the sieve to expel liquid. A wet purée will not hold together no matter what you add.
- Rub through a sieveA drum sieve and wooden mushroom in the original kitchen; a food mill on the fine plate today, or a short pulse in a processor followed by a sieve to catch fibres. Avoid over-blending, which makes the purée slack.
- "Thicken with stock or cream"Counter-intuitive phrasing: both are liquids. The sense appears to be enrich and bind — reduce the purée with a few tablespoons of strong poultry stock or heavy cream over low heat until it coats a spoon. If it still runs, a teaspoon of butter worked in off the heat, or the merest dusting of flour cooked in first, will hold it.
- CayenneCayenne appears freely in Victorian seasoning, but here it should read as warmth behind the squash, not heat. A pinch for the whole batch, tasted and repeated if needed.
- Serve very hotMarrow purée cools fast and thins as it sits. Keep it in a bowl over hot water and send it out at once with roast or boiled chicken.
Vegetable marrow was one of the great successes of nineteenth-century British kitchen gardening — an easy, enormously productive squash that appears constantly in Victorian cookery books precisely because gardeners had more of it than they knew what to do with. Cassell's places this among the sauces rather than the vegetables. The sauce is mild to the point of blandness by design, meant to sit under roast fowl the way bread sauce does, and the cayenne is there to keep it from disappearing entirely. Its near-total absence from modern cooking has less to do with taste than with the vegetable itself, which fell out of favour once the smaller, firmer courgette was picked young and sold in its place.