Skip to main content
Main

To Boil Vegetable Marrow

A boiled vegetable marrow served on toasted bread with butter, or stewed in white gravy with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Boil Vegetable Marrow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil

  1. Peel the vegetable marrow very thin and cut it into quarters.

  2. Remove the seeds and boil the quarters in water with a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Once cooked, carefully remove the marrow.

Serve on toast

  1. Place the marrow on toasted bread.

  2. Pour melted butter over the marrow.

Stew in gravy

  1. When half cooked, remove the marrow.

  2. Place the marrow in white gravy with a little salt and black pepper, then stew gently.

  3. Thicken the gravy with a little flour and butter.

  4. Add a little cream.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Its flesh softens with cooking, becoming tender enough to eat with a spoon.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Its starch thickens the gravy as it heats with butter and liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

When half cooked, remove the marrow.. Marrow breaks down quickly. Removing it at the halfway point stops it turning mushy and watery, so it can finish gently in the gravy and keep its shape.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes