Occasionally I encounter a fellow American while I’m “out and about” (how Midwestern). It’s usually hard to pick out the accent in a throng of people as there are certain British dialects which sound similar, Irish for example. Today I had one such encounter. This time it wasn’t the accent that gave it away, but rather the vocabulary. The word that piqued my interest was zucchini.The equivalent here is courgette and while I occasionally hear eggplant instead of aubergine, I never hear the word zucchini. I personally prefer zucchini to courgette because it’s just more fun. Ironically I was looking for courgettes (thinking zucchini) when I heard this woman say zucchini.
In my current bid to recapture my childhood, a recurring theme in my posts on Freyas blog, I had decided to make zucchini bread. I had everything in the cupboard to do a great recipe from the classic book Beard on Bread (James Beard 1973) except for zucchini. Now my mom will wonder why I haven’t used her recipe from the family cookbook, but I’m claiming immunity under the double jeopardy clause as this recipe has already been used once this year. Besides, it’s only because of my mom that I like zucchini bread or rather despite my moms attempts to put me off zucchini forever.
When I was a kid, my mom and her friend Gin had garden plots at LaCrosse Floral. They would go to the garden just about every day in the summer and pull weeds while my brother Mark and I would play under a big willow tree on the property. Occasionally they would rope us into carrying buckets of water around, but for the most part we were free to play under that tree with no obligation. We didn’t realise in the early weeks that we were simply buying on credit. We weren’t informed of the terms of the contract either. It was only when presented with massive sacks full of green beans to top and tail that we realised that we were not only paying the debt back, but at a massive APR, the monetary equivalent of which would be around 78.9%.
Hour after hour we’d sit in the basement while our friends rode bikes, flew kites, and played baseball. Fingers green, knuckles aching, skin dry from the little fuzz on fresh beans that soaks up moisture like a sponge, we would stagger outside to play in the last remaining hour of daylight. The whole process would begin the next day and the day after that. I’ll tell you something too, there’s no way to efficiently cut the ends off of beans. You line them up thinking it’s faster to hack at twenty beans at a time, but this just isn’t the case. One at a time is the easiest method, albeit monotonous.
Yes, beans were abundant. Fortunately I loved them and still do. (Ros may think Goon is weird for dipping beans in honey, but I love them with Ketchup!) The only other thing that grew in that garden was something I wasn’t as fond of, zucchini. I hated it! When I was a kid, before the days of lazy parenting, or at least during the awkward phasing in period of lazy parenting, not liking food didn’t mean not eating food. Since beans freeze and zucchini doesn’t I was condemned to zucchini every single summer day.
My mom did make attempts at preserving these horrible marrows. I don’t remember them all, but I’m sure she canned some and I know for a fact that she even managed to make zucchini powder. I remember it being in a little bottle and having it sprinkled over food in place of other seasonings, you know, the kind that actually tasted of something. While her attempts to maintain this particular method of torture throughout the winter months proved unsuccessful for the most part, at least her ability to disguise the device of torture was more refined. The most effective of her ruses was, you guessed it, zucchini bread!
I remember the taste and texture and how great this bread was cold with a layer of butter. I also remember that there was a lot of this when I was growing up. A funny thing happens when you use vegetables as the foundation of a bread dough or cake batter (and make no mistake, the word bread is only used to make this seem healthier. Zucchini Bread is actually a cake.). A natural sweetness and moisture is imparted into the finished product that can’t be achieved by any other means. The reason is that vegetables have a very high water content, but for the most part retain their shape during cooking. When added to a bread or cake the cell walls of the vegetable don’t break down until the baking process nears completion. This means that the moisture in the vegetable is delivered gradually through the process of osmosis over several days. The addition of a vegetable to bread or cake means the finished product will stay edible for several days longer. Want proof? Carrot cake!
Zucchini bread is very similar to and, in my opinion, better than carrot cake. It’s only the colour and absence of alliteration that prevents it from capturing the adoration by the masses currently heaped on the altar of carrot cake. Freya disagrees with me on this point, but she would, being slavishly devoted to the cream cheese frosting and the “cute little frosting carrot on top” that garishly garnishes the iconic carrot cake. But it just ain’t fair! Zucchini bread is carrot cakes ugly little brother. He doesn’t get the chicks and he wouldn’t be caught dead in the same outlandish wardrobe, but by gum, he will prove himself and he’ll do it on his own merits!
CARL GOHS’ ZUCCHINI BREAD (From James Beard Beard on Bread)Ingredients:
3 Eggs
2 Cups granulated sugar (a lot, even by 1970’s standards)
1 Cup vegetable oil (I used sunflower)
2 Cups grated, peeled raw zucchini
3 Teaspoons vanilla extract
3 Cups plain flour
1 Teaspoon salt
1 Teaspoon baking soda
1/3 Teaspoon baking powder
3 Teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 Cup coarsely chopped walnuts (I omitted this)
METHOD
Beat the eggs until light and foamy. Add the sugar, oil, zucchini, and vanilla and mix lightly but well. Combine the flour, salt, soda, baking powder, and cinnamon and add to the egg-zucchini mixture. Stir until well blended, add nuts, and pour into 2 greased loaf tins. Bake in a preheated oven (350°F/175°C) for one hour. Cool on a rack before serving.
No comments:
Post a Comment