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Vegetable Marrow

A dish of marrows cooked in butter, lemon juice, sugar, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the marrows thinly and cut them into pieces based on their size and the dish you will use.

  2. Grease a deep sauté pan with butter.

Cook

  1. Add the marrows to the pan and sprinkle with nutmeg, pepper, coarse sea salt, and pounded sugar.

  2. Pour in the white broth to keep the marrows moist.

  3. Boil gently for 10 minutes, then reduce the liquid until it thickens.

  4. Stir in 2 ounces of butter and the juice of 4 lemons.

  5. Pour the sauce over the marrows and serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Vegetable marrows
Forms the bulk of the dish and softens as it cooks in the broth.
White broth
Provides moisture and, as it reduces, body for the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the thickened sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce against the mild marrow.
Pounded sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness to balance the lemon's acidity.

The step that matters

Reducing the liquid. Boiling gently and reducing until the liquid thickens concentrates the broth into a sauce. Reducing too far can leave the sauce too thick or sticky, while stopping too early leaves it thin and watery.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Cardamomfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sugar, lemon. 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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