Courgette Central

It’s that time of year when I begin to suffer from a surfeit of courgettes, having discovered several years ago that they cannot be beaten in terms of the amount of yield you get for the work you need to put in: essentially, sticking one seed, price approx. 25p, into a small pot of damp compost, and then planting it into the ground four or so weeks later and ignoring it, means around 25 courgettes plus flowers if you wish. I’m a lazy gardener who doesn’t like to nurture things (my view is that if they can’t be bothered, neither can I), but I get a giant courgette harvest every year: vegetables well out of proportion to my own effort, inducing a pleasant feeling that I’ve somehow gamed the system.

Alan Davidson resolutely uses the name zucchini rather than courgette in his Oxford Companion to Food, explaining, entirely reasonably, that it was the Italians who first bred these small marrows and that until the 1920s the French referred to them as courgettes d’Italie; it therefore makes little sense that we’ve adopted the French name instead of the Italian one (incidentally, it means ‘little gourd’, just as zucchini does in Italy). The first reference to courgettes in the OED dates from 1932, which seems fairly astonishing when you think how easy it is to grow courgettes in the UK, but then, I suppose they would have been considered just small vegetable marrows, which certainly were eaten (I remember my grandmother cooking marrows in a cheese sauce, or stuffing them with mince).

Mrs Beeton prefers to boil vegetable marrows, which I feel would give a rather watery result, especially since they are even pulpier than courgettes, but the Victorians were not keen on crisp vegetables and no doubt they were to contemporary tastes. She suggest serving boiled marrows with melted butter or white sauce, but does give one rather nice-sounding recipe for egg and breadcrumbing and then frying slices of marrow. She has this to say about the family:

THE VEGETABLE MARROW.—This vegetable is now extensively used, and belongs to the Cucurbits. It is the C. ovifera of science, and, like the melon, gourd, cucumber, and squash, is widely diffused in the tropical or warmer regions of the globe.

The downside of hitting the courgette jackpot in the garden is that by the end of the summer you do get a bit fed up of them, but I’ve found that they also work well if you grate and drain them, mix with a grated onion and garlic, then bake in a cheese sauce with a handful or two of parboiled rice thrown in to soak up the juices. It makes a lovely main course.