The thin-skinned green summer squashes, otherwise known as zucchini, are at their best when stewed long and slow to bring out the flavour
In chapter nine of her magnificent book Vegetable Literacy, Deborah Madison describes how, in Arizona, an elderly cowboy named Ernie cooked her a steak with a mess of zucchini stewed in margarine for half an hour; a film treatment in a sentence. She goes on to describe her scepticism, and how it dissolved because these turned out to be the best zucchini she had ever eaten. And not because of the margarine or zucchini, but because Ernie had cooked them long enough for the defiant and definite squash flavour to emerge.
I think Ernie the cowboy would get on with my friend Ezio the civil engineer, who showed me how to cook zucchini long enough that they stop keeping up appearances and collapse into a sauce for pasta. And I think both Ernie and Ezio would get on with the Roman cook, gardener and teacher Carla Tomasi, who taught me that, most of the time, vegetable goodness lies at one of two poles: raw or well-cooked, rarely in the middle. This seems particularly true with zucchini, which, of course, are courgettes, or baby marrows to others. However, as I am writing about Ernie and Madison in Rome, zucchini seems the right name this week.
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