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Vegetable Marrow, Spring Soup Of
Pare the marrows, cut them into small pieces, and remove the seeds; weigh, and put the marrow into a saucepan with a piece of butter about the size of an egg, and stew it gently until reduced to a pulp. Add boiling stock, a little at a time, in the proportion of a pint of stock to a pound of marrow, weighed before cooking. Add salt, a small lump of sugar, and cayenne, and serve with toasted sippets. Time, about half an hour to simmer the marrows. Probable cost, 4d. per pint.
A plain purée soup of the kind Victorian cookery books produced by the dozen: one vegetable, stock, and enough butter to carry the flavour. The whole thing depends on driving off water before the stock goes in.
- What a vegetable marrow isA large, mature Cucurbita pepo — an overgrown courgette, sold in Britain and rarely elsewhere. A pale summer squash, or courgettes left to grow to 1-1.5 lb, behaves the same way. Winter squash such as butternut is denser and sweeter and will give a different soup.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Victorian books measured butter by eye against familiar objects; 'the size of an egg' was generally reckoned at about 2 oz, though such measures were necessarily approximate.
- The hinge: stew it dryMarrow is mostly water. Sweat the pieces in the butter over low heat, uncovered or barely covered, until they collapse and the liquid they throw off has largely gone. Add stock too early and you get a thin, washy soup that no amount of simmering will thicken.
- Proportions and yieldOne pint of stock per pound of pared, seeded marrow. Two pounds of prepared marrow with two pints of stock makes roughly four generous servings.
- TextureThe original expects the pulp to break down completely; the recipe does not say so, but a Victorian cook would most likely have pushed it through a hair sieve. A stick blender does the same job in seconds; pass it through a sieve afterwards if any skin or fibre remains.
- SeasoningThe lump of sugar is not decoration — marrow is bland and faintly bitter, and a teaspoon of sugar lifts it. Cayenne here means a pinch, enough to give warmth rather than heat.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of toasted or fried bread, served in the soup or handed separately. Cut them from a firm white loaf and toast until dry through, or they go to sludge on contact.
- Probable costFourpence a pint is cheap. Marrows were a glut crop in any garden with a manure heap, which may be why so many recipes exist for using them up.
Vegetable marrows descend from squashes domesticated in the Americas; the marrow became established as a distinct British garden vegetable over the nineteenth century, grown large and watery on hotbeds and manure heaps where it thrived on little attention. By the time Cassell's was compiled the marrow was a fixture of cottage and kitchen gardens, and cookery writers found plenty of uses for a vegetable that arrived in quantity and tasted of very little — hence the butter, the sugar and the cayenne here, all doing work the marrow cannot do for itself. The "spring" of the title may refer to early forced marrows rather than the main summer crop, since a full-grown outdoor marrow is a late-season vegetable. The method — sweat in butter, let down with stock, sieve, serve with sippets — is the standard Victorian purée soup, applied elsewhere in the book to other vegetables that would break down under heat.