Cooking With Richard

What is a marrow? In England old men grow prize marrows on allotments. But I don’t know anyone who has knowingly eaten one of these overgrown courgettes, even amongst my Yorkshire-bred allotment-renting relatives. In the US, marrows are called squashes (they’re apparently a type of pumpkin), but their more common “butternut squash” is definitely different from our English marrow.

What the heck does a marrow taste of? Well, we’re about to find out!

Here we’ve got shallots, chorizo and parsley from the garden:

That is cooked up with a bit of couscous, some tomato purée, and coriander:

Update (after about 20 minutes):
Well, hmmm, I managed to burn the filling and the marrow itself was looking about the same as it did at the beginning. I’ve covered it with foil and turned down the temperature a bit.

This is how it turned out, with a bit of magic photo pixie dust to make it look good.

The bottom line I suppose is that the filling tastes rather salty and meaty (hello, chorizo), and the marrow flesh tastes of … nothing. Imagine a melon which isn’t sweet, and doesn’t taste of melon. It has that melon texture, tastes of very little at all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 9:36 pm and is filed under photos, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.