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Vegetable Marrows

A dish of boiled and battered marrow pieces fried in butter or simmered in soup stock, served on toast or in a dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrows

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the vegetable marrow and remove the seeds.

  2. Cut the marrow into pieces.

  3. Boil the pieces in water for 20 minutes to 1 hour until tender.

Cook

  1. In a separate bowl, mix flour, water, and salt to create a batter.

  2. Dip the boiled pieces in the batter and fry in butter for 10 minutes.

  3. Alternatively, place the boiled pieces in a saucepan covered with soup stock and simmer until tender.

Serve

  1. Serve the marrow on buttered toast or in a deep dish.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender when boiled.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps the battered pieces brown while frying.
Flour
Forms a batter that coats the pieces and crisps when fried.

The step that matters

Boiling until tender. The boiling time varies widely, from 20 minutes to 1 hour. Pieces that are undercooked stay firm and do not soften, so test them with a fork before battering or simmering.

“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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