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Vegetable Marrow a L'Espagnole
1 vegetable marrow 1 bunch of herbs 1 pint brown sauce 2 large tomatoes 1 onion 1 gill of sherry Peel the marrow and cut it into pieces, removing the seeds. Put into boiling salted water and cook twenty minutes. Slice the tomatoes and onion, put in a saucepan with the remaining ingredients; let the whole stew gently till thoroughly cooked. Pour over the marrow and serve hot.
A plain braise dressed up with a French sauce name. Two things need attention before you start: what a vegetable marrow actually is, and the fact that a book of meatless cookery is calling for a sauce that is traditionally built on veal stock.
- Vegetable marrowA marrow is a summer squash left to grow large — the same plant as a courgette or zucchini. Two or three large zucchini, or one 2-3 lb pale green marrow if a farm stand has them, will serve four. Peel, halve lengthways, scrape out the seedy core, and cut into thick batons or 2-inch chunks.
- The cooking time is too longTwenty minutes in boiling water reduces marrow to grey pulp. Five to eight minutes in well-salted boiling water is enough; it should hold its shape when drained. Marrow is watery to begin with, so drain it thoroughly in a colander before saucing or the dish pools.
- Brown sauceEspagnole: a brown roux slackened with stock, with tomato and mirepoix, simmered and strained. In a meat-free kitchen build it on a strong mushroom and onion stock, or use a good jarred demi-glace-style sauce. A pint is 2 cups American, 20 fl oz if the book's measures are Imperial — either amount is generous for one marrow.
- A gill of sherryA gill is a quarter pint — 5 fl oz Imperial, 4 fl oz (half a US cup) American. Use a dry amontillado or oloroso, not cream sherry, and let it simmer openly for several minutes so the raw spirity edge cooks off and the sauce does not taste harsh.
- Bunch of herbsA bouquet garni — parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf, tied with string or bundled in a leek leaf so it can be lifted out before serving. Nothing in the original suggests the herbs are meant to be eaten.
- The tomato and onionSlice both thin and give the onion a few minutes in butter or oil before the sauce goes in; raw sliced onion stewed in sauce stays sharp and stringy. Peeled tomatoes break down better, and in winter a tin of chopped tomatoes, drained, is closer to a good summer tomato than a hard supermarket one.
- Yield and servingServes four as a main with rice, mashed potato or bread to take up the sauce; six as a side. Season the finished sauce hard — marrow contributes almost no flavour of its own and will mute whatever it touches.
Vegetable marrow was the standby squash of British kitchens well into the twentieth century, grown to enormous size on allotments and prized for bulk rather than flavour — which is exactly why cookbooks kept dressing it in sauces. "À l'espagnole" here means served with sauce espagnole, one of the mother sauces codified in nineteenth-century French practice; the name is generally traced to the Spanish-born queens and cooks of the French court, though the connection is traditional rather than documented, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was often used loosely for a brown sauce with tomato. Borrowing the vocabulary of the classical sauce repertoire was one way to make a bland vegetable read as a main course — the marrow itself is bland, but the sauce carries the authority of a proper dinner.