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Zucchetti Farcis
Take some very small pumpkins, boil them for about a quarter of an hour in salt and water, remove the seeds, and fill their places with a forcemeat made as follows. Take some crumb of bread and soak it in milk; press it, and add the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs and two raw yolks; chop up very finely six blanched almonds with a couple of cloves, put these in; lastly add two ounces of grated Parmesan cheese, and a little salt and grated nutmeg. Stew these gourds in butter, and serve with white sauce.
A stuffed-squash dish with a meatless bread-and-cheese forcemeat. The chief thing to get right is the identity of the vegetable: "very small pumpkins" here means courgettes, not pumpkin.
- What zucchetti areZucchetti is a diminutive plural from Italian zucca, gourd — a young summer squash, i.e. a courgette or zucchini; small ones, roughly 4-6 inches, suit the dish. Round courgettes or pattypan squash also work and may hold the filling more easily.
- Halve or hollowThe recipe assumes you can "remove the seeds" and fill the cavity, which means either splitting them lengthwise and scooping the seedy centre, or coring them from one end. Split halves are far easier to stuff and to serve.
- The parboilA quarter of an hour in salted water will leave small courgettes limp, since they still have to stew in butter afterwards. Five minutes is enough to soften them for hollowing; drain and pat dry so the forcemeat is not watered down.
- Bread and milkUse a couple of ounces (about 60 g) of crustless white bread — the recipe gives no weight — soaked in milk and squeezed nearly dry, a panade. Wring out the excess milk or the filling will slump.
- ClovesTwo whole cloves chopped in with the almonds is a lot of clove for one dish by modern taste. A pinch of ground clove gives the same warm note without dominating the Parmesan and nutmeg.
- AlmondsBlanched sweet almonds, skins slipped off after a dip in boiling water. Chop them to a coarse meal rather than a paste; they are there for texture as much as flavour.
- Stewing in butterSet the stuffed squash in a buttered sauté pan with a lid, over low heat, and let them go 20-25 minutes until a knife slides through easily and the filling is set. The recipe says only to stew them in butter; baking them covered in a moderate oven is a modern departure, but gives a tidier result if the halves are inclined to topple.
- White sauceA plain béchamel — butter, flour, milk, salt, nutmeg. Keep it thin enough to pour; the filling is already rich with cheese and yolk.
- YieldThe forcemeat as given fills roughly six small courgettes, enough for four as a first course or a light supper dish with bread.
The title is a small monument to late-Victorian kitchen language: an Italian vegetable name grafted onto a French cookery term, farci, stuffed. The book appeared at a time when the courgette is generally thought to have been little known to British cooks, which is why it reaches for "very small pumpkins" by way of explanation, since squashes sat loosely under gourds and pumpkins in English usage. The filling itself is thoroughly Italian in outline: soaked bread, hard and raw egg yolks, almonds, Parmesan and nutmeg is the sort of ripieno often associated with Italian regional cooking for stuffed courgettes, tomatoes and onions alike. Meatless stuffings of this sort were useful in Catholic and Lenten cooking, though Cassell's, a resolutely secular household reference, presents it simply as a way to make a bland summer vegetable worth serving.