Home › The Principles of Cookery › Vegetable Marrows, Mashed
Vegetable Marrows, Mashed
Boil two good-sized vegetable marrows in water till tender (see VEGETABLE MARROWS, BOILED). Take them up, drain them, turn them into a bowl, and mash them with a wooden spoon. Heat them in a saucepan with a piece of melted butter the size of a walnut and a little pepper and salt. Marrows cooked thus are excellent served piled high in the centre of a dish of cutlets.
A simple British side dish whose success depends almost entirely on getting the water out. Vegetable marrow is very wet, and mashing it without draining hard gives you soup.
- What a vegetable marrow isA courgette (zucchini) grown to full size — usually 10-14 inches long, pale green or striped. Two "good-sized" marrows is perhaps 3-4 lb, feeding four to six as a side. An overgrown zucchini from a garden behaves much the same way.
- Peel and seed firstBoiled-marrow entries of this kind normally take it for granted that the skin is pared and the seedy core scooped out; mature marrow skin toughens and the seeds coarsen. Cut the flesh into thick chunks before boiling.
- Drain much harder than statedThis is the hinge. After draining in a colander, press the pulp firmly with the back of a spoon, or return it to the dry pan over low heat and stir until the steam stops rising. Otherwise the mash will slump on the plate.
- Boiling timeChunks are tender in 8-12 minutes. "Till tender" leaves room for a long boil that turns marrow grey and flavourless; test with a knife tip early.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 tablespoon, or 15 g. "Melted" here probably means simply that it goes in soft, not clarified. For 3-4 lb of marrow you may want double that; nutmeg is a common addition, though this recipe does not call for it.
- TextureA wooden spoon gives a coarse, slightly fibrous mash, which is what is wanted for piling. A food processor turns marrow to liquid; avoid it.
- Serving"Cutlets" means lamb or veal chops arranged in a ring, with the mash mounded in the middle. It works equally as a plain vegetable dish, or spread under grilled meat to catch the juices.
Vegetable marrow was a Victorian kitchen-garden staple, and British cooks of the period grew squash on to full size — the marrow's bulk and mildness were the point, since it could be boiled, stuffed, baked or mashed and stretch a modest amount of meat. Cassell's places this among a run of variations on a single vegetable, which is how the big Victorian dictionaries of cookery worked: one basic method (here, boiled marrow) followed by short entries showing what else could be done with it. The suggestion to pile the mash in the centre of a dish of cutlets reflects a general presentation habit of the period, in which a vegetable was built into a mound or border on a garnished dish. The watery blandness that made marrow so useful then is also why it later lost ground to the same plant taken young, as courgette, though marrows are still deliberately grown and stuffed in Britain.