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Vegetable Marrows, Marinaded and Stewed
Take three good-sized marrows; pare, seed, and quarter them, sprinkle pepper and salt over them, and pour upon them a quarter of a pint of vinegar and two table-spoonfuls of Lucca oil. Let them lie in this marinade for half an hour. Drain them, put them into a stewpan, cover with good brown gravy, and stew them gently until tender. Lift them up carefully with a slicer, place them on a hot dish, pour the gravy over them, and serve. Time to stew the marrows, about twenty minutes.
A simple braise that depends entirely on the quality of the gravy and on not overcooking the marrow into pulp. Two ingredient names need translating before you start.
- Lucca oilA Victorian trade name for olive oil from Lucca in Tuscany, then the standard fine table oil in Britain. Any decent extra-virgin olive oil does the job.
- Vegetable marrowA mature summer squash, essentially an overgrown courgette. If you cannot find one, use very large courgettes or a young pattypan; avoid winter squash, which behaves quite differently and will not soften in twenty minutes.
- A quarter of a pintImperial measure, so about 5 fl oz or 150 ml of vinegar. That is a generous quantity for a half-hour marinade; drain thoroughly or the finished dish turns sharp.
- "Good brown gravy"In Victorian usage this generally meant a rich brown meat gravy or the kitchen's standing brown sauce, rather than the drippings from a single roast. A well-reduced beef stock lightly thickened, or a decent demi-glace let down with stock, gives the right body.
- PreparationPare, seed and quarter means peel, scoop out the seedy core, and cut into large pieces. Older marrows have tough skin and watery seed cavities; both need to go.
- The twenty minutesTake it as an upper limit and start testing at twelve. Marrow collapses quickly once it yields to a knife tip, and collapsed pieces cannot be lifted out whole.
- A slicerA fish slice, meaning a wide slotted spatula. Nothing narrower will move a cooked marrow quarter intact.
- YieldThree good-sized marrows will serve roughly six to eight as a side dish with roast or braised meat, though the recipe itself states no number of servings.
Vegetable marrows became a fixture of British kitchen gardens in the nineteenth century, prized because they grew enormous with little attention and stored reasonably well; the difficulty was always that they taste of almost nothing, which is why period cookbooks bury them in gravy, cheese sauce, or a sharp marinade as here. The recipe's structure is thoroughly French in habit: a brief acidulated marinade to season the flesh, then a gentle braise in brown sauce. The reference to Lucca oil dates it usefully. Before Italian olive oil was widely branded, British grocers sold it by region, and Lucca was the name that stood for quality, familiar enough that a cookery writer could use it without explanation.