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Stuffed Vegetable Marrow or Squash
(Austria.) Peel and remove the centre from a large, flat squash, slicing it across. Fill both these halves with a forcemeat made of cold minced veal or game or fowl or fish, and an equal amount of bread-crumbs, 1/2 cup of milk or white stock, herbs, and seasoning. Tie these two parts together, and cook in white broth or water. Drain, put in a dish, pour over a sauce made from stock, and serve with a border of boiled rice or mashed potatoes.
A late-Victorian way of using up cooked meat, built around a squash cut through the equator and reassembled. The critical choices are the squash and the binding of the stuffing.
- Vegetable marrowIn British and Continental usage this is an overgrown summer squash, not a winter one. A large round zucchini, a pattypan, or a small pale marrow works; hard-shelled squashes like butternut or Hubbard will not hold together well when boiled.
- "A large, flat squash"Sliced across means cut horizontally into two bowls, each hollowed of seeds and spongy core. Aim for something 6-8 inches across so the two halves marry when tied.
- The forcemeat needs a binderCold minced meat, an equal volume of crumbs and 1/2 cup of liquid will be a loose mixture. The recipe specifies no egg, but a beaten egg or two would bind it into a farce that slices when the squash is opened.
- White broth and white stockBoth mean an unbrowned stock, from veal or chicken bones simmered without roasting, so nothing colours the dish. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute.
- Tying itCotton kitchen twine around the equator in two directions, as you would tie a parcel. Simmer, never boil hard, or the squash slumps and the seam opens.
- TimingNo time is given. A summer squash of this size needs 30-45 minutes at a bare simmer, half submerged and turned once; test with a skewer through the shell, not the stuffing, which is already cooked.
- Reheating cooked meatThe filling goes in cold and cooked. Give the centre a full run at simmering heat rather than pulling it early, since the stuffing insulates itself and comes up to temperature slowly.
- The sauce"a sauce made from stock" is left undefined; in this idiom it would be a white sauce, stock thickened with a white roux, close to a veloute, and cream and lemon suit it. If the cooking liquid is used, strain it first, as the squash sheds liquid.
- YieldOne squash of this size serves three or four with the rice or potato border, which is there to hold the sauce as much as to fill the plate.
This is one of a long string of national attributions in With a Saucepan Over the Sea, a 1902 collection that gathered dishes from Europe and beyond for American cooks, each tagged with a country of origin. Stuffed marrows and squashes belong to a broad Central European tradition -- one often linked to Ottoman influence -- of filling a hollowed vegetable with a meat and bread farce and poaching it, the same logic that produces stuffed peppers, stuffed cabbage and stuffed cucumbers in Austrian and Hungarian cookery. The instruction to use "cold minced veal or game or fowl or fish" marks it as a rechauffe, a made-over dish giving yesterday's roast a second, presentable life, and the forcemeat, poaching in white stock and rice border all draw on the vocabulary of professional French cooking as it filtered into domestic manuals.