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Vegetable Marrow Tartlets
Vegetable marrows, about 1 1/2 pounds 1 tablespoon of sugar 1 teaspoon of ginger 1/2 pint of milk 1 tablespoon of flour Peel and remove the seeds of the marrow, and cook for twenty minutes in the milk, with the sugar and the ginger. When tender, pass through a sieve, return to the saucepan, and add the flour, mixed to a smooth paste, with a little of the milk; let it thicken, stirring all the time, for about five minutes. Make some pastry, fill with the mixture, and bake for twenty minutes.
A thin sweet squash filling in a pastry case, closer to a light pumpkin pie than to a custard. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need supplying.
- What a vegetable marrow isAn overgrown summer squash, harvested well past courgette size, with pale watery flesh and a large seed cavity. The closest supermarket stand-ins are the biggest zucchini you can find, or pattypan or a light-fleshed summer squash; winter squash is denser and sweeter and will make a different, heavier tart.
- The half pintIf you read this as an Imperial half pint it is 10 fl oz; as a US half pint, 8 fl oz. Either works here, since the flesh releases so much of its own liquid that the milk is a cooking medium as much as a measured ingredient.
- Oven heatNone is given. Bake blind-lined tartlet shells at 400-425F, then return the filled tarts at 375-400F for the twenty minutes stated, until the surface is set and just coloured.
- Blind-bake the casesThis is the hinge. The filling is a loose milk-and-flour purée with no egg to set it, so a raw pastry base will go sodden. Line, weight and bake the shells until dry and pale gold before filling.
- Drive off the waterMarrow is mostly water. After sieving, keep the purée over heat until it mounds on the spoon rather than slumping; a tablespoon of flour alone will not thicken a watery pulp, and an under-reduced filling weeps into the crust.
- GingerGround dried ginger is most likely meant, since it is measured by the teaspoon. A teaspoon to 1 1/2 lb of a bland vegetable is assertive but not excessive; taste after sieving and adjust, since the sugar is only a single tablespoon and the mixture is barely sweet by modern dessert standards.
- SievingA food mill or a stick blender followed by a sieve saves the arm work. The sieve still matters for the stray fibres from around the seed cavity.
- YieldAbout 12 tartlets in a standard bun tin, or one 8-inch shallow tart. Best eaten the day they are baked, warm or barely cool.
Vegetable marrow was a mainstay of British and Irish kitchen gardens, valued for bulk and keeping rather than flavour, and it turns up often in early twentieth-century cookery as something a household had to use up in quantity. A sweet spiced marrow filling is one of the ways of making a watery vegetable into something worth serving at table. The pairing of squash with ginger and milk in a pastry case invites comparison with pumpkin pie, with a starch-thickened puree standing in for the eggs and cream a richer kitchen would have used. Marrow also had a long career in preserves: marrow and ginger jam was common, and marrow was sometimes worked up as a mock conserve, on the same principle exploited here, that the flesh carries whatever flavour you give it.