Home › Vegetables › Fried Pumpkin
Fried Pumpkin
Take a slice of pumpkin, remove the rind and the seeds. Cut it into strips as for French fried potatoes, only finer. Roll in flour and dip in egg, and fry in boiling lard or olive-oil.
If desired as garnishing for meat, cut the pumpkin exceedingly fine, roll in flour, but not in egg, and fry.
Spinach "alla Romana" Clean and prepare the spinach. Put one pint of cold water with one tablespoon of salt on to boil, and when it boils put in the spinach. When the spinach is cooked--in about ten minutes--drain it in a colander, and turn onto it the cold water from the faucet for a few moments. Then squeeze out all the water with the hands. Put three tablespoons of olive-oil into a frying-pan; when this is thoroughly hot add the spinach, salt, and pepper. Cook for a few moments, stirring well with a fork and spoon, so the oil will permeate the spinach; then serve. Do not chop the spinach.
Two Roman side dishes run together on one page: pumpkin strips fried in batter, and spinach finished in oil. Both are sound, but the spinach timing belongs to an era of tougher, older leaves.
- Which pumpkinItalian usage of this period generally covers what would be called zucca, a dense, dry winter squash rather than a watery field pumpkin. A stringy pumpkin sold for carving will not hold strips; choose something firm and low in water.
- Cutting"Finer than French fried potatoes" means batons about a quarter-inch square. For the garnish version, closer to matchsticks, since they are fried naked in flour and need to crisp fast.
- Coating orderFlour first, then egg, is the order given and it works: the flour gives the egg something to grip. Beat the egg with a pinch of salt and let excess drip off, or the strips will stick together in the pan.
- "Boiling lard or olive-oil"Fat at 350–375F. Lard was widely used for frying in parts of northern and central Italy, and the recipe offers it alongside oil; a mild olive oil or any neutral oil behaves the same here. Fry in small batches and drain on paper.
- Spinach: ten minutes is too longModern spinach, especially bagged leaf, is tender in two to three minutes in boiling water — often less. Ten minutes was written for mature, coarse-stemmed spinach and will reduce today's leaves to grey mush before they ever reach the oil.
- The cold rinse mattersDraining and running cold water over the spinach stops the cooking and holds the green. Then squeeze hard — genuinely dry spinach is the difference between oil coating the leaves and oil sitting in a puddle.
- Do not chopThe recipe closes with this instruction, so it clearly matters to the author: left whole, the leaves carry the oil; chopped, they tend toward a purée and the texture is gone.
- Quantities and yieldNo weight is given for the spinach, and none for the pumpkin beyond "a slice." A pint of water with a tablespoon of salt will handle only a modest quantity of leaves, so scale up or cook in batches; expect a single slice of pumpkin to stretch further as a fine-cut garnish than as a side.
Simple Italian Cookery belongs to a small run of early twentieth-century books written to introduce American households to everyday Italian cooking rather than restaurant showpieces, and these two dishes are typical of that aim: cheap vegetables, olive oil, almost no equipment. Frying squash in this way is long established in Italian practice — the same treatment given to zucchini, artichokes and courgette flowers, all of which turn up in fritto misto. Spinach alla romana is generally understood as spinach blanched and tossed in oil, and Roman versions are often made with garlic, raisins and pine nuts; the plainness here is in keeping with the book's title.