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.

It's All Gone to Custard

Mmm, custardy goodness. Love the retro packaging too.

Excited by the sudden improvement in the weather, and inspired in part by reading Matt O'Connor's new book The Icecreamists last week (on which more later if I get around to it), I purchased myself a new ice cream maker this week. (My old one is leaking weird liquid, so I have consigned it to the bin. I wouldn't have thought it of you, John Lewis! It was own brand and everything!) I like to be prepared when I cook, so I've been doing some research on ice cream recipe books as well. As we know, ice cream can be made in various different styles - the American, or more specifically Philadelphia, style is to freeze cream with sugar and fruit, and the French or Italian style is to make a thin custard with egg yolks and then freeze that for a richer flavour and less chance of ice crystals forming.

I have purchased David Lebovitz's book after reading this article in the Guardian, as well as the excellent reviews, index &c on Amazon, and of course will be consulting my uncle Timothy Walker's book If You Can Read You Can Cook. Uncle Tim is a great ice cream maker and I have fond memories of basil ice cream and strawberries at a barbecue circa 1995.

Reading all these books' careful instructions on how to make a custard base got me to thinking about how fundamentally complicated and delicate an operation custard-making is, and how strange it is therefore that, as Alan Davidson says, it is fundamental to Western cooking (think of dishes like quiche Lorraine or bread and butter pudding, as well as the hot stuff we pour over pies and crumbles). He details how it was made in medieval times - before easily controllable hobs - by being baked in bread ovens after the bread had been taken out, or cooked slowly in a chafing dish under which hot coals were laid, presumably to allow for better control over the heat. He also mentions some medieval tips (important to know if you had unreliable equipment) on how to thicken it, such as mixing in breadcrumbs, or a gelling agent made from carrageen moss. Usually it was eaten as a semi-solid dish – rather like how Americans eat it, as 'pudding' – rather than as a sauce to pour over other things, a change of role that occurred in the nineteenth century.

It is no wonder that the cornflour-based custard powder made by 'Alfred Bird FCS, Experimental Chemist', as his shopfront described him, was a godsend to cooks in the mid-nineteenth century. No more curdling, no more scrambled eggs. I've made ice cream with Ambrosia custard before but have never quite stooped to using powder. And what with my modern gas hob, quality saucepan with no hot spots and ready supply of ice to ice-bath my cream in and avoid overheating of the mixture, I don't really have any excuse to do so.

Two more custard facts: did you know that the word comes from croustade, or tart, and in Britain came to denote the filling rather the whole thing? And, delightfully, that in the 1920s one pâtisserie in Hollywood turned their entire operation over to making the custard tarts that were thrown in films, after perfecting a recipe for a throwable tart with the perfect slurp?