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VEGETABLE MARROWS, BOILED (another way)
Peel the marrows, halve, and, if very large, quarter them, free them from seeds, and put them into boiling water to simmer gently until tender. Take them up with a slicer, drain them, and serve upon toast. Send melted butter in a tureen to table with them, or, failing this, a little fresh butter. Time: young marrows, fifteen to twenty minutes, old marrows, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 2d. to 6d. each. Sufficient, a good-sized marrow for three or four persons.
A plain boiled vegetable of the kind that filled out Victorian dinners. Two things need translating: what "melted butter" meant in 1890, and the fact that the longer of the two cooking times will leave you with pulp.
- Melted butter is a sauceIn British cookery of this period "melted butter" means butter sauce — butter thickened with flour and a little water or milk, not simply butter liquefied. That is likely why it goes to table in a tureen. The recipe's fallback is simply a little plain fresh butter.
- What a marrow isA vegetable marrow is a mature summer squash of the same species as courgette/zucchini, grown on to a foot or more. A large zucchini, a pale Italian cocozelle, or a Mexican grey squash all behave the same way. Winter squashes are not a substitute; they are denser and sweeter.
- A slicerA fish slice — a broad, flat, perforated turner. Marrow collapses easily once cooked, so lift it whole rather than tipping the pan into a colander.
- The forty-five minute figureThree-quarters of an hour applies to a tough, seedy end-of-season marrow with thick flesh, and even then it produces something very soft. Modern squash sold at that size will be watery long before then. Test at 10 minutes and expect 12–20 for anything you can buy today.
- Water is the enemyMarrow is mostly water and simmering adds more. Salt the cut halves and leave them 20 minutes, pat dry, and steam rather than boil if you want the pieces to hold shape. Whatever the method, drain hard and let them stand a minute before they meet the toast.
- The toast is structuralIt presumably serves to absorb the liquid the marrow gives up. Use a firm white bread, toasted dry and not buttered, or it will go to paste under the sauce.
- SeasoningThe original specifies no seasoning at all, leaving salt and pepper to the cook and the table. Boiled marrow is very mild; it wants salt, plenty of black pepper, and benefits from nutmeg or chopped parsley stirred into the butter sauce.
- Yield and cost"2d. to 6d. each" is Victorian pence and tells you only that marrows were cheap. One good-sized marrow serves three or four as a side dish, as stated.
The vegetable marrow was a Victorian garden staple as much as a market vegetable — easy to grow, enormously productive, and prone to reaching absurd sizes if left on the vine. The heading "(another way)" shows this is one of several treatments, and it is the plainest: boiled, drained, set on toast, and sent to table with butter sauce, a standard English dressing for boiled vegetables of the period. The squash itself is a New World plant, Cucurbita pepo, which reached Europe in the sixteenth century; the British took to the marrow stage while Italians favoured the same fruit picked small, as courgettes, a preference that only became widespread in Britain in the twentieth century. The distinction between "young" and "old" marrows in the timing note suggests a cook working through a crop from summer into autumn, when the skins had hardened and the seeds inside had to be scooped out.