Cucurbita pepo var. cylindrica
The zucchini is, in the strictest sense, a New World plant given an Old World form, and its deep ancestry lies far from the kitchen gardens of Lombardy with which it is now identified. Its wild forebears belong to Cucurbita pepo, a squash first taken into cultivation in the highlands of Mesoamerica around 8000 BCE, amongst the earliest of all the domesticated plants of the Americas. Rind fragments and charred seeds recovered from the dry cave sites of the Oaxaca valley, notably Guilá Naquitz, place squash alongside the bottle gourd at the very beginning of American agriculture, a thousand years and more before maize was tamed. The earliest growers did not prize the plant for its watery flesh, which in the wild forms was thin and bitter, but for its seeds, which are rich in oil and protein and could be dried and stored against the lean season, and for the hard, durable rinds of the mature fruit, which served as bowls, scoops, and containers.
Over the following millennia the cultivators of Mesoamerica selected this single, endlessly plastic species into a great range of forms, from sweet autumn pumpkins to acorn and crookneck squashes, and squash took its place as the third member of the Three Sisters, the milpa polyculture in which it was sown together with maize and beans. The arrangement was a masterpiece of agronomic logic: the maize stood tall as a living trellis, the beans climbed it and fixed nitrogen into the soil, and the broad, sprawling leaves of the squash shaded the ground between, suppressing weeds and holding the moisture in the earth. Yet the slender green vegetable we now call zucchini did not exist in the Americas at all. It was bred from C. pepo stock only after the plant crossed the Atlantic, the work of European, and above all Italian, gardeners who selected for a long, thin-skinned, mild-fleshed fruit eaten immature, before the seeds hardened and the rind toughened. So thoroughly was the squash naturalised in its new home that one of its parts was embraced almost at once: the golden blossom, the fiore di zucca, was prized long before the modern fruit was perfected, and within a generation of the squash reaching Italy the flowers were being stuffed with ricotta and anchovy, sheathed in a light batter, and fried in the kitchens of Rome and Naples, in a preparation that has scarcely altered to this day.
The squash crossed the Atlantic with the first returning ships of the Columbian Exchange, reaching the Iberian Peninsula in the opening decades of the sixteenth century along with maize, beans, tomatoes, and chillies. In Spain its welcome was cool: the Cucurbita pepo squash was grown more as a curiosity, an ornament, or a fodder for livestock than as a dish for the table, and the Spanish, well supplied with their own gourds, were slow to take it into their cooking. The more receptive kitchens lay further east, in the lands of the Ottoman Empire and the eastern Mediterranean, where the summer squash was embraced with an enthusiasm that Iberia never showed. Ottoman cooks took kabak into the great repertoire of dolma and meze, hollowing and stuffing it with spiced rice and herbs, and the cooks of Ottoman Syria and the Levant developed the pale, slender, tender-walled variety they called kousa, the foundation of kousa mahshi, the stuffed marrow that became an emblem of Levantine home cooking. Across the Aegean, Greek cooks grated it into the fritters called kolokithokeftedes, and in the Maghreb it slipped into the tagine and the couscous pot.
It was in Italy, however, that the squash was most thoroughly transformed, and it was the southern kitchens that moved first. Neapolitan cooks sliced and fried the elongated zucca lunga in olive oil and steeped it in vinegar and mint in the manner called alla scapece, a technique descended from the ancient Roman practice of preserving fried fish and vegetables in acid, whilst in Rome the blossoms were battered and fried in a tradition rooted in the Jewish quarter. From these southern beginnings the cultivation of the long summer squash travelled up the peninsula through Liguria and into the Po valley, where it met the patient, decades-long work of selection that would at last produce the vegetable we know. The modern zucchini was born not in the milpa of Mexico but in the kitchen gardens of Lombardy: the market gardeners of Milan bred, over many seasons, a consistently slender, dark-green, thin-skinned cultivar at its sweetest and most tender when cut young, and by approximately 1880 this variety was being listed in Milanese seed catalogues under the name zucchino, 'little gourd', the diminutive plural of which, zucchini, would conquer the English-speaking world.
From Lombardy the new cultivar set out on its final voyages. Italian emigrants carried its seed across the Atlantic to the United States, to Brazil, and to Australia in the great migrations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, planting it in the market gardens of Brooklyn, the interior of São Paulo, and the truck farms of Victoria, and giving the English-speaking New World its word, zucchini. The same vegetable reached Britain by an entirely separate path, through French rather than Italian channels: French gardeners had named the long green squash courgette, the diminutive of courge, and it was under that French name that Elizabeth David introduced it to British readers after the Second World War. This double transmission, Italian to the Americas and French to Britain, is the reason a single plant from Oaxaca is eaten today under two different names on opposite shores of one ocean.
Zucchini belongs above all to the great tradition of cucina povera, the resourceful poor kitchen of the Italian south and the eastern Mediterranean, where its very abundance was at once its virtue and its difficulty. A single healthy plant fruits prolifically through the whole of summer, setting far more than any household can eat before each tender green finger swells into a watery, club-sized marrow and loses its delicate flavour, and it is this relentless surplus that has driven cooks to such inventiveness with it. The vegetable is sliced and slow-fried with garlic and basil into a sauce for pasta, as in the Neapolitan pasta alla Nerano with its melting Provolone del Monaco; it is puréed into the silky basil-scented crema di zucchine of Lombardy; it is grated and bound with feta, dill, and mint into Greek fritters; it is stuffed in the Levantine and Ottoman manner; and, where all else fails, it is grated into the sweet, spiced quick bread with which American cooks dispose of the August glut.
What is most remarkable about the zucchini's long journey is that it was genuinely reinvented in each place it arrived rather than merely translated, transformed every time according to the inner logic of the local kitchen: stuffed and simmered in the Levant, fried and soured in Naples, slow-stewed into ratatouille in Provence, battered into feather-light tempura in Japan, and tempered with cumin and mustard seed into a dry sabzi in the cities of northern India. Today it is grown on every inhabited continent and ranks amongst the most widely cultivated vegetables on earth, with great commercial production in China, India, Turkey, and throughout the Mediterranean basin, and it is prized in the modern kitchen for its lightness, its low calorie count, and its willingness to take on almost any flavour. Yet its cultural heartland remains where it was perfected, in the kitchen gardens of Lombardy and the trattorie of Rome, the place where a squash from the highlands of Oaxaca was given a diminutive Italian name and sent out to the rest of the world as though it had always been Italian.
Historical Journey of Zucchini
Mesoamerica — c. 8000 BCE
The whole long history of the zucchini begins in the highland valleys of Mesoamerica, where the wild ancestors of Cucurbita pepo were first taken into cultivation. The dry caves of the Oaxaca valley, and Guilá Naquitz in particular, have preserved squash seeds and rind fragments dated to approximately 8000 BCE, amongst the oldest evidence anywhere of a domesticated plant in the Americas and a full thousand years before the taming of maize. The earliest growers valued the plant not for its thin, bitter wild flesh but for its seeds, which are dense in oil and protein and could be parched and stored against the hungry months, and for the hard rinds of the mature gourds, which served as bowls, dippers, and rattles. Over the generations that followed, the cultivators of Mexico shaped this single, remarkably malleable species into a wide family of forms, sweet and starchy, round and crooked, summer and winter, and squash settled into its place beside maize and beans at the very foundation of the Mesoamerican diet. From this Oaxacan cradle the plant would spread north and south across the continent, and, far in the future and far across an ocean, would furnish the raw material from which Italian gardeners bred the slender green vegetable now eaten on every inhabited continent. The wild squash of the highland valleys is thus the true and distant origin of the zucchini, however thoroughly its later Italian career has obscured the fact.
Aztec Empire, Central Mexico — c. 1200 CE
By the height of the Aztec Empire, squash stood as the third pillar of the Three Sisters, the milpa system of companion planting that was the agricultural foundation of central Mexico. In the fields around Tenochtitlan and across the valley of Mexico, the maize rose as a living pole, the climbing beans wound up its stalks and drew nitrogen into the soil, and the broad, sprawling leaves of the squash, ayotli in the Nahuatl tongue, shaded the ground between, holding the moisture in the earth and smothering the weeds before they could take hold. The arrangement fed a great civilisation, and squash was woven through Aztec life well beyond the field: the seeds, ground into the meal called pepita, thickened sauces and were pressed for oil; the flesh was stewed and roasted; the golden blossoms were cooked fresh; and the dried rinds served the household as vessels. Several distinct kinds of Cucurbita, soft summer squashes and hard-shelled winter pumpkins alike, were grown across the empire and set down in the painted codices alongside maize and beans as the staple crops on which tribute and sustenance depended. The squash blossom remains a treasured ingredient of Mexican cooking to this day, folded into quesadillas and soups, a direct and unbroken inheritance from the milpa of the Aztecs and a reminder that the vegetable Europe would later claim as its own was already, here, an ancient and honoured food.
Kingdom of Castile & Aragon, Iberian Peninsula — c. 1525
The squash made its European landfall in the gardens of Spain, carried home in the holds of returning ships within a generation of the first transatlantic voyages, one strand of the vast biological traffic of the Columbian Exchange that brought maize, beans, tomatoes, chillies, and the potato to the Old World. Spanish gardeners planted Cucurbita pepo in the warm soils of Andalusia and Castile, where it grew readily enough, but the welcome it received was lukewarm. The Spanish, already amply furnished with their own gourds and well content with them, regarded the newcomer at first as a botanical curiosity, a thing for the ornamental garden or for the feeding of livestock, rather than as a serious vegetable for the table. Under the Castilian name calabaza, a word borrowed long before from Arabic, it spread slowly through Iberian kitchen gardens over the following decades, valued more for novelty than for flavour. Yet Spain's true importance in the squash's story lies less in what its cooks did with the plant than in its role as the gateway through which the vegetable entered Europe: from the Iberian gardens, traders, travellers, and the dense commercial networks of the Mediterranean carried its seed eastward to the Italian peninsula and the Ottoman lands and northward into France, to kitchens that would prove far more imaginative than the Spanish in turning the New World gourd to account. The cool Spanish reception thus stands as the quiet, unpromising beginning of one of the most successful culinary naturalisations in European history.
Ottoman Empire, Anatolia — c. 1580
Where Spain hesitated, the Ottoman world embraced the summer squash with immediate and lasting enthusiasm. Carried east through the trading networks that knit the Mediterranean together, the new vegetable reached Anatolia and the imperial kitchens of Topkapı Sarayı by the later sixteenth century, and Turkish cooks took to kabak wholeheartedly, finding in it a fruit perfectly suited to the techniques they already prized. Above all it answered the genius of the dolma, the great Ottoman art of the stuffed vegetable: the young squash was hollowed of its core and packed with a fragrant filling of rice, minced lamb, onion, and herbs, then simmered until tender, in the dish that became kabak dolması. In its meatless guise it joined the family of zeytinyağlı preparations, vegetables cooked gently in olive oil with rice, currants, pine nuts, and dill and served cool, and it was set on the table dressed with a garlicky yoghurt that cut its sweetness. The imperial kitchen, by drawing the American squash into the established dolma repertoire, in effect created a new and enduring category of stuffed vegetable that would radiate outward across the whole of the empire, from the Balkans to the Levant to North Africa, carrying both the plant and the technique with it. Kabak dolması, served cold under its veil of garlic yoghurt, remains one of the defining dishes of the Turkish summer table and a monument to the Ottoman talent for making a foreign ingredient wholly its own.
Ottoman Syria & Greater Levant — c. 1600
Carried south from Anatolia through the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the squash took deep root in the kitchens of the Levant, and the gardeners of Damascus, Aleppo, and Beirut bent it to their own taste, selecting over time a distinct variety they called kousa: a short, pale grey-green squash, smaller, milder, and more tender-walled than the darker Italian forms, and ideally shaped for hollowing and stuffing. From it the Levantine cook built kousa mahshi, one of the defining dishes of the region's home cooking. The fruit is cored with a long, narrow tool, leaving a thin shell, and packed with a filling of rice and minced lamb seasoned with the warm Levantine spicing of allspice, cinnamon, and black pepper, then stood upright in a pot and simmered slowly in a tomato broth, often alongside stuffed vine leaves and the cored marrows sharing the same pot. The dish is the very emblem of the mahshi tradition, the art of stuffing that runs like a thread through the whole eastern Mediterranean, from the Aegean to the Nile, and it carries with it a particular domestic intimacy: the patient coring of the squash, often done by mothers and daughters together, and the prizing of the scooped-out cores, which are never wasted but fried with eggs or garlic into a cook's reward. In the Levant the New World gourd became, within a few generations, an ingredient so naturalised that its American origin was entirely forgotten.
Kingdom of Naples, Southern Italy — c. 1600
It was in the Kingdom of Naples and the kitchens of southern Italy that the squash first became a distinctly Italian vegetable, treated not as a curiosity but as a thing to be cooked with care and imagination. Neapolitan cooks took the zucca lunga, the elongated summer squash, sliced it thin, and fried it in olive oil, then dressed it whilst still warm with vinegar, garlic, and torn mint in the preparation called alla scapece, a method of preserving fried food in acid and aromatics that descends directly from the ancient Roman in scapece and its Arab and Spanish cousins. The result, sharp, sweet, and fragrant with mint, became one of the canonical antipasti and contorni of the Neapolitan table and a model for how the watery squash could be concentrated and lifted by heat and acid. In Rome a second and even more enduring tradition took hold around the flower rather than the fruit: the golden blossoms, fiori di zucca, were opened, sometimes stuffed with mozzarella and anchovy, sheathed in a light batter, and fried until crisp, a preparation rooted in the cooking of the Roman Jewish quarter, the cucina ebraico-romanesca, that has persisted essentially unchanged for four centuries and remains a fixture of Roman tables from the humblest fryer to the grandest restaurant. From the same southern kitchens came the practice of baking hollowed squash stuffed with minced meat and Parmesan, zucchine ripiene, and from these Neapolitan and Roman beginnings the cultivation and cookery of the long summer squash spread northward through the Italian peninsula.
Kingdom of France, Provence — c. 1650
In the warm market gardens of Provence the long green squash found its French home and its French name, courgette, the diminutive of courge, 'gourd', coined on the same instinct that had given the Italians their zucchino: a name that prized the fruit small, young, and tender. Provençal cooks, working within a cuisine built on the sun-ripened vegetables of the kitchen garden and the generous use of olive oil and herbs, took the courgette readily into the long-simmered vegetable stews of Nice and its hinterland. From those rustic dishes would in time be codified the most celebrated preparation of the region and one of the great dishes of French regional cooking: ratatouille, a slow-cooked assemblage of courgette, aubergine, tomato, sweet pepper, onion, and garlic, perfumed with the herbes de Provence and cooked, in the best versions, with each vegetable softened separately before being brought together so that none is lost in the whole. The courgette belongs equally to the lighter Provençal repertoire of summer, sliced thin into the tarte aux courgettes with Gruyère and herbs, and dropped, diced, into the soupe au pistou, the vegetable and bean soup finished at the table with a pounded paste of basil, garlic, and cheese. It was through Provence and the French kitchen, and ultimately through French cookery writing, that the vegetable would later reach Britain under its French name, so that the courgette of the English greengrocer is, etymologically and culinarily, a Provençal inheritance.
Republic of Genoa, Liguria — c. 1680
Genoa, one of the great medieval trading ports of the western Mediterranean, receives Cucurbita pepo through Spanish and Neapolitan maritime commerce in the 17th century. The Ligurian kitchen, built on frugality and garden abundance, absorbs the summer squash readily into its principal culinary language: pasta. The Genovese tradition of dressing pasta with garden vegetables, established through centuries of cucina povera, finds in the tender young zucchina an ingredient of ideal character: mild, abundant in summer, and receptive to the perfumed local basil that grows on every terraced hillside of the Riviera. Pasta con zucchine alla Genovese combines briefly sautéed young zucchine with garlic and torn basil, tossed with trofie or linguine and finished with aged Pecorino: a preparation distinct from the later Lombard version in its lighter, more herb-forward register. The port also serves as a northward transmission point for the cultivar into the Po Valley, contributing to the selective breeding work that would produce the modern Milanese zucchino by the 1880s.
Ottoman North Africa & Maghreb — c. 1700
The squash reached the Maghreb along the twin currents of Ottoman trade across the southern Mediterranean and the older threads of Andalusian and Moorish exchange that linked Iberia to North Africa, and it settled comfortably into a cuisine already rich in slow-cooked vegetable dishes. Moroccan and Algerian cooks took the new gourd into the two great vessels of their kitchen, the tagine and the couscous pot, where it was braised gently with chickpeas, preserved lemon, and the warm, complex spice blend ras el hanout until it surrendered its sweetness into the sauce, the squash absorbing the saffron, ginger, and cinnamon of the characteristic Maghrebi flavouring. Steamed over the simmering broth, it joined the heaped mound of seven vegetables that crowns the Friday couscous. Further east along the coast, Egyptian and Tunisian cooks developed their own uses, hollowing and stuffing the squash with spiced rice and meat in the local mahshi manner, grilling it over charcoal, and folding it into the chunky cooked salads and tagines of the Tunisian table. In every case the American vegetable was absorbed so completely into the existing grammar of North African cooking, the language of preserved lemon, chickpea, harissa, and the tagine, that it ceased to be felt as foreign at all, taking its place beside the aubergine and the pumpkin as simply another vegetable of the summer garden, native in everything but origin.
Ottoman Greece & Aegean Islands — c. 1750
In the Greek lands of the Ottoman world the squash, kolokithi, became a beloved staple of the summer kitchen, and Greek cooks gave it some of its most appealing forms. Chief amongst them is kolokithokeftedes, the courgette fritter: the squash is coarsely grated, salted and squeezed of its water, then bound with crumbled feta, plenty of chopped dill and mint, spring onion, and egg, formed into small cakes, and fried until crisp and golden without and soft within. Served warm with a cooling dollop of tzatziki, it is one of the signature dishes of the meze table and a small masterpiece of turning a watery, abundant vegetable into something savoury and irresistible. Across the Aegean islands the golden blossoms were stuffed with rice and herbs and gently cooked, a treasured delicacy of high summer, and the squash itself was folded into the wider repertoire of the Greek table: layered into the vegetable pies called pites between sheets of filo, built into courgette versions of moussaka and the baked dish briam, and hollowed for the stuffed-vegetable tradition of gemista alongside tomatoes, aubergines, and peppers. Frugal, prolific, and endlessly adaptable, the courgette suited the Greek cook's gift for coaxing flavour from humble garden produce with feta, lemon, olive oil, and a handful of fresh herbs, and it remains a fixture of the Greek summer, eaten the length of the country from the islands to the mainland villages.
Kingdom of Italy, Lombardy — c. 1880
In the kitchen gardens around Milan, the modern zucchini was at last brought into being. The market gardeners of Lombardy, working through many seasons of patient selection upon the long summer squash that had travelled north from Naples and Liguria, fixed at last a consistently slender, straight, dark-green, thin-skinned cultivar bred above all for tenderness and mild sweetness when cut young, before its seeds could harden or its skin toughen. By approximately 1880 this perfected variety was being listed in Milanese seed catalogues under the name zucchino, 'little gourd', and it spread quickly through the kitchen gardens of northern Italy. This was the decisive moment in the vegetable's history, for it was this Lombard cultivar, and not any American squash, that the world would come to know as the zucchini, and it was from here that the plant set out on its final journeys, carried in the seed-pouches of Italian emigrants to the United States, Brazil, and Australia. In its Lombard homeland it found its own refined uses, slow-cooked with basil and Pecorino into pasta con le zucchine and blended into the silky, basil-scented soup crema di zucchine, dishes lighter and more herb-forward than the robust frying traditions of the south. From a squash of the Mexican highlands, by way of Spain, Naples, and Liguria, the Milanese gardeners had made one of the most widely grown vegetables on earth, and given it its name.
São Paulo & Southern Brazil — c. 1895
The modern zucchini reached Brazil in the baggage of the great wave of Italian immigration that remade the south of the country between 1880 and 1920, when well over a million Italians, most of them from the north, from Lombardy, the Veneto, and Friuli, crossed the Atlantic and settled above all in the state of São Paulo. They carried their seed stock with them, the Milanese cultivar amongst it, and planted the familiar kitchen-garden vegetables of home in the red earth of the São Paulo interior. The Brazilians gave the newcomer a telling name: abobrinha italiana, 'little Italian gourd', the qualifier 'Italian' marking it out from the native pumpkins and squashes, the abóboras of the New World, that had been part of Brazilian cooking since long before the Europeans came and were themselves descendants of the same American Cucurbita family. In the Italian-descended communities of the interior the vegetable was cooked in the manner of the old country, hollowed and stuffed, braised, and baked, and the dish that took firmest root was abobrinha recheada, the squash filled with spiced minced beef and tomato and baked until tender, an unmistakable echo of the Lombard zucchine ripiene transplanted to the southern hemisphere. Through Italian Brazil the zucchini, a New World plant returning to the New World in an Old World guise, completed one of the stranger circles of its long journey.
Eastern United States — c. 1910
The zucchini entered the United States in the hands of Italian immigrants from Lombardy and Campania, who brought the seed of the Milanese cultivar to the great ports of arrival and planted it in the market gardens of their new communities, in the truck farms of Brooklyn, the kitchen plots of New Jersey, and the fertile valleys of California, where the Italian gardeners of the Napa and Santa Clara districts grew it for sale. It was here that the vegetable acquired its English name, zucchini, the Italian plural taken whole into American speech, even as the same plant was being called courgette by the British. American home cooks soon discovered the quality that has defined the zucchini's reputation ever since: its extraordinary, almost comical productivity, a single healthy plant yielding fruit faster than any family can eat it through the height of summer. From this glut grew one of the small folk traditions of American suburban life, the leaving of anonymous bags of surplus zucchini on neighbours' porches, and from the same surplus came the vegetable's most distinctively American dish. Zucchini bread, a sweet, spiced quick bread in which the grated squash all but vanishes, lending only moisture and tenderness to a loaf scented with cinnamon and studded with walnuts, was the ingenious American answer to the question of what to do with too much zucchini, and it remains a fixture of the home kitchen and the bake sale, the vegetable disguised as a cake.
Victoria & South Australia — c. 1955
The zucchini arrived in Australia with the great post-war migration of Italians, when more than three hundred thousand crossed to the Antipodes between 1945 and 1960 and remade the Australian vegetable garden and the national table in the doing. Italian-Australian market gardeners, working the fertile flats of Victoria, the plains of South Australia, and the Sydney basin, planted the zucchini alongside the capsicum, the eggplant, and the tomato, the whole Mediterranean summer garden that they introduced to a country whose cooking had been overwhelmingly British, and in a generation these once-exotic vegetables became ordinary fixtures of the greengrocer and the backyard plot. The zucchini found its place in the Australian domestic kitchen above all through the zucchini slice, a baked savoury custard of grated zucchini, egg, grated cheese, bacon, and self-raising flour set in a tray and cut into squares, served warm or cold. Simple, forgiving, and endlessly reproduced from the backs of recipe cards and the pages of community cookbooks, the zucchini slice became one of the most made dishes in the entire Australian repertoire and a fixture of the school lunchbox, the picnic, and the buffet table for generations. Through it the descendant of an Oaxacan squash, by way of Lombardy and the migrant ship, became as homely and unremarkable a part of Australian life as the lamington or the meat pie.
Japan — c. 1960
The zucchini came late to Japan, and by two converging routes. The American occupation of the years from 1945 to 1952 brought a flood of Western vegetables into the urban markets and the diet of the cities, and at much the same time the deepening influence of French and Italian cooking upon Japan's professional kitchens carried the courgette into high-end restaurant cuisine. It arrived, however, in a country that already possessed one of the world's great squash traditions, for kabocha, the dense, sweet winter squash, had been cultivated in Japan since Portuguese traders introduced New World Cucurbita by way of Southeast Asia in the sixteenth century, and the Japanese cook approached the newcomer with a long-practised understanding of how to handle the family. The zucchini was absorbed most naturally into the tempura repertoire, taking its place beside kabocha, aubergine, and shiso under the fryer's batter. In Japanese hands the technique reaches an extraordinary lightness: the batter is mixed at the last moment with ice-cold water and a barely stirred flour, so that it clings to the sliced zucchini in the thinnest possible veil, and in the hot oil the coating sets into a pale, lacy, crackling shell whilst the flesh within steams to tenderness in its own moisture. Served with a dip of tentsuyu, the dashi-based sauce sharpened with grated daikon and ginger, the zucchini tempura expresses the vegetable's mild sweetness with a delicacy found nowhere in its Mediterranean home.
United Kingdom — c. 1965
Britain took to the courgette remarkably late, and it did so through the printed page as much as through the greengrocer. Until the middle of the twentieth century the British grew their squash to maturity, prizing the great water-laden marrow, stuffed and baked or boiled to blandness, and the small, tender courgette was all but unknown in the country. It was Elizabeth David, in her Mediterranean Food of 1950 and her French Provincial Cooking of 1960, who introduced the vegetable to British readers, writing of the Provençal and Italian kitchens with such evocative authority that a generation of cooks was persuaded to seek out ingredients their grandmothers had never seen. The courgette, under its French name, was at first a curiosity of London restaurants and the kitchens of adventurous, Francophile home cooks, but through the 1960s and early 1970s it steadily displaced the marrow in the British kitchen garden, gardeners learning to cut the fruit young rather than letting it bloat on the vine. By the middle of the 1970s the supermarkets stocked it as a standard vegetable, and it settled into the British repertoire in dishes such as the chilled summer soup of courgette and mint. So the descendant of the Lombard zucchino completed its passage from the Provençal market to the British suburban table, keeping, alone amongst the English-speaking nations, the French name it had acquired on the way.
Northern India — c. 1975
The courgette reached India late and quietly, arriving after independence through the country's continuing Commonwealth trade links with Britain and the gradual westernisation of the urban markets, appearing on the shelves of grocers in Delhi and Mumbai who catered to a cosmopolitan, Western-leaning professional class. It entered, however, a cuisine already supremely well versed in the cooking of gourds, for the Indian kitchen had for thousands of years worked with the native lauki, the bottle gourd, and the small round tinda, and the courgette's mild, watery flesh behaved in the pan almost exactly as these did. Indian cooks therefore took it up without difficulty, treating it as simply another gourd to be made into a dry sabzi: cut into pieces and cooked down with a tadka, the sizzling tempering of cumin and mustard seeds bloomed in hot oil, then turned with turmeric, green chilli, and ginger and finished with a scattering of fresh coriander. Absorbing the spices readily and cooking quickly, the zucchini slipped into the rotation of everyday vegetables on the urban North Indian weekday table, an unremarkable and undemanding addition rather than a celebrated one, valued for its convenience and its familiarity to a palate that had always known how to coax flavour from the blandest of gourds. In this modest naturalisation, the vegetable closed yet another loop of its journey, a New World squash reaching the subcontinent under a French name to be cooked by an ancient Indian method.
