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Vegetable Marrows

A boiled vegetable marrow served on toast with melted butter, seasoned with pepper, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrows

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the marrow and cut it in half.

  2. Remove the seeds.

  3. Cut the marrow into pieces.

  4. Boil the pieces until soft.

  5. Drain the marrow in a colander until all the water is removed.

Make the mash

  1. Mash the marrow with a fork.

  2. Season the mash with pepper, salt, and sugar.

Serve

  1. Slice the boiled marrow.

  2. Place the slices on toast.

  3. Pour melted butter over the toast.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

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

Pepper and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 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 marrow
Provides the bulk of the dish, with mild, moist flesh that softens when boiled.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness that balances the mild, savoury marrow.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and melts into the toast for flavour.

The step that matters

Drain the marrow thoroughly. Boiled marrow holds a lot of water. If it is not drained well, the mash becomes watery and diluted, and the flavour is weakened.

“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

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