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Vegetable Marrows, Boiled
Peel the marrows, free them from seed, cut them into six or eight pieces, and put them into boiling water; let them boil gently till tender. Lift them up carefully with a slicer, put them on toast, pour melted butter or white sauce over them, and serve. No. 2. Put the marrow whole and without skinning it into boiling water. Let it boil until tender. Take it up, halve, pare, and seed it, lay the halves on toast, with the hollow part uppermost, and fill them with rich melted butter. No. 3. Pare and seed the marrows, divide them into quarters, and the quarters into halves. Trim them neatly. Rub the inside of a saucepan with butter. Lay the pieces of marrow in it, and sprinkle over them a little pepper, salt, grated nutmeg, and pounded sugar. Pour upon them half a pint of veal stock, and boil gently till tender. Lift them on to a dish; add to the gravy the juice of half a lemon and a little piece of butter; pour it over the marrow, and serve. If liked, the marrows may be stewed in milk instead of gravy, and they may be seasoned with pepper, salt, and pounded mace. Time to boil: ten to twenty minutes, if boiled in slices; if boiled whole, longer, according to size. Probable cost, 2d. to 6d. each.
Three methods for the same vegetable, in ascending order of ambition: plain boiled, boiled whole then filled, and stewed in stock. A few Victorian conventions need translating before any of them work as intended.
- What a vegetable marrow isA summer squash left to grow to full size — the same plant as a courgette, harvested large. A pale-skinned marrow of 1-2 lb is closest; a very large zucchini works. Winter squashes such as butternut are not substitutes, being denser and sweeter.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn this book melted butter means the standard English butter sauce: butter, flour and water or milk cooked to a pourable consistency and seasoned. Plain liquid butter will slide straight off the marrow and soak the toast. The alternative "white sauce" named in method 1 is essentially the same thing built on milk.
- Half a pint of veal stockImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 US cups. Veal stock is rarely bought now; a light unsalted chicken stock gives the same neutral background. Season at the end, since the liquid reduces into the sauce.
- Drain it hardMarrow is largely water and boiled marrow releases more of it onto the plate. Lift it out and let it sit in a colander a minute before it goes on the toast, or salt the cut pieces for 20 minutes and pat them dry before cooking. This is the difference between a dish and a puddle.
- TimingTen to twenty minutes for pieces is generous by modern taste; test at six or seven minutes with a knife tip. Marrow goes from firm to collapsed quickly. A whole unpeeled marrow of about 1 1/2 lb needs roughly 20-25 minutes, and must be pared while hot for method 2.
- A slicerA fish slice — a broad, flat, slotted turner. Boiled marrow pieces break under a spoon, so lift them flat and support the whole length.
- Pounded sugarLoaf sugar crushed fine, i.e. caster sugar. Method 3 wants only a pinch, to lift the stock rather than sweeten the dish.
- YieldOne medium marrow serves two as a vegetable course, three or four as a side. The toast beneath is structural as much as it is food — it absorbs the sauce and the residual water.
The vegetable marrow occupied a solid place in the Victorian kitchen garden precisely because it was easy: prolific, cheap to grow, and, as this entry notes, costing twopence to sixpence apiece. Squashes are New World plants, and marrows became a familiar cottage-garden crop in Britain during the nineteenth century; the habit of letting them swell to great size, rather than picking them small as courgettes, is usually described as a British preference. The three methods here show a standard escalation of period vegetable cookery: boil and dress with butter sauce for family eating, boil whole and fill for something more presentable, or stew in stock with nutmeg and mace for a dish fit to be sent up on its own. The toast underneath is an old English device for watery vegetables, and appears elsewhere in Cassell's with vegetables such as asparagus and seakale.