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Vegetable Marrow
Potirons, or Giraumons, à la Hollandaise are cut in pieces, baked, and served in Hollandaise sauce. à la Provençale are cut in halves, fried, and filled with a stuffing of onions, breadcrumbs, oil, etc.
Potirons, or Giraumons, au gratin-a purée of vegetable marrow with cream, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and browned.
YAMS or SWEET POTATOES.
Patates au beurre are cooked, cut in slices and served with butter. à la Française are cut in pieces, and served in a sauce of butter, flour, cream, etc.
For Beignets de patates they are cut in pieces, soaked in brandy, dipped in batter and fried.
SALADS.
Salade à la Macédoine is composed of separate heaps of vegetables, with oil and vinegar. de pommes de terre-slices of potatoes and beetroot, with chopped parsley, etc., oil and vinegar. de cresson aux pommes-watercress and slices of potatoes, with oil and vinegar. de tomates-slices of raw tomatoes with chopped shallots, etc., oil and vinegar. de choux rouges à la Russe-red cabbage, with sauce of sour cream, hard-boiled yolks of eggs, etc. aux concombres-slices of cucumber with oil and vinegar. aux betteraves-slices of beetroot, with chopped Portugal onions, oil and vinegar. de chicorée à la Française endive, with oil, vinegar and garlic. à la Française-lettuce, or any one kind of salad only, with oil, vinegar, etc.
The end of the vegetable chapter: marrows and pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and then the salads. The French names here are worth checking against the English ones, because the first of them does not match.
- Potiron is pumpkinThe page puts Potirons and Giraumons under Vegetable Marrow, but potiron is the French for pumpkin and giraumon is a squash of the turban kind. They are relatives and they cook alike, which is probably why the book treats them as one thing, but a French recipe calling for potiron means pumpkin, and pumpkin behaves differently from a marrow: denser, sweeter, far less water.
- Marrow is mostly waterAny of these dishes will flood unless the flesh is salted and drained, or roasted rather than boiled, before it goes further. The au gratin entry, a purée with cream, crumbed and browned, is soup without that step. The page does not mention it because every cook using the book already knew.
- Fry the halves before stuffingÀ la Provençale cuts the marrow in halves, fries them, and only then fills them with onions, breadcrumbs and oil. Frying first dries and firms the cut surface. The order matters more than the filling does.
- The salads are oil and vinegarEvery salad here is dressed with oil and vinegar, apart from the red cabbage, which gets sour cream with hard-boiled yolk. No mustard, no emulsion, no mayonnaise. The dressings are thin by design, poured over sliced vegetables rather than tossed through leaves.
- Salade à la Française means one leafThe page defines it as lettuce, or any one kind of salad only. A French salad was a single kind of leaf dressed plainly. The mixed bowl sold under that description today is the opposite of what the term meant here.
- Composed, not tossedSalade à la Macédoine is separate heaps of vegetables with oil and vinegar, and the potato, beetroot, cucumber and tomato salads are all sliced and laid out. These are arranged dishes, meant to be read across a table from a distance, which is why they are built from things that hold a cut edge.
Marrows, pumpkins and the contents of a kitchen garden arrive at the table here with French names, which shows how far the convention reached. It was not only the fillet of beef and the iced soufflé that had to be written in French on the card; so did the red cabbage and the watercress. The salad list is the plainest cooking in the whole book — sliced vegetables, oil, vinegar, chopped parsley — and it still had to be called Salade de cresson aux pommes before it could be served. The sweet potatoes a few lines above get the same treatment, three dishes and a French name for each, one of them soaked in brandy before being fried in batter.