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Vegetable Marrow

A dish of boiled vegetable marrows served with a butter, egg yolk, sugar, and lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil

  1. Choose young small vegetable marrows with smooth skin.

  2. Boil them in 2 quarts of water with 1 ounce of coarse sea salt and 1 ounce of butter.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, heat ½ pint of melted butter until near boiling.

  2. Add the egg yolk, 2 pats of butter, sugar, and lemon juice to the pan.

Serve

  1. Test for tenderness with a needle, then dish them on mashed potatoes.

  2. Sauce the vegetable marrows and serve.

  3. If large, cut them in half lengthwise; if small, remove the insides, boil until tender, and warm in the sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Vegetable marrows
Form the main body of the dish and become tender when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour in both the boiling water and the sauce.
Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce and gives it a smooth, rich body as it cooks.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter sauce.

The step that matters

Heating the egg yolk into the butter sauce. Egg yolk thickens when gently heated but curdles if the butter is too hot. Keeping the butter only near boiling and adding the yolk carefully helps the sauce stay smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More vegetable marrow recipes

Soup 35Boiled 19Puree 10Fried 9Stuffed 8Preserved 7 See all 32 →

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