WTN: courgette, zucchini
James Harbeck
courgette, zucchini
You want to know how to make zucchini? I’ll show you how. I’ll also show you how to make courgette. They’re the same thing, literally. So get ready for some gourd times.
Let me start by saying that this summer squash, Cucurbita pepo, is brain food. How can that be, given that they’re about 95% water? Look, beer is about 95% water too, and it still makes you have thoughts. But in this case, I’m going to pretend that etymology is a suitable guide to essence.
The zucchini, also known as the courgette, is, in some places, called the baby marrow – baby because it’s smaller than a full-grown marrow. It’s not that it looks like part of a baby’s leg (although it does, at least of a baby Shrek). It’s that the pith of vegetables was, from Old English times, called the marrow, and from this the summer squash in question was called a vegetable marrow when it first hit the scene in England in the 1800s (although technically that’s what you call a larger version of the plant, hence baby marrow for our plant du jour). And the word marrow traces back through Germanic roots to Proto-Indo-European *mosgʰós, which meant ‘marrow’ and also ‘brain’. The brain is, after all, in one way of looking at it, the marrow of the head. So hey, brain food.
OK, yes, that’s kind of silly. But that’s not the only time the brain comes in when we’re making courgette and zucchini. Let’s start back with the Latin word for ‘gourd’: cucurbita. It was a name for the kinds of gourds that are used for fall decoration and music making, and also for other related squash, and also, figuratively, for someone who was kind of, uh, obtuse (we could say boneheaded). And when more kinds of squash were brought over from the Americas starting in the 1500s, cucurbita was applied to them too, as you can see in the Latin name for our vegetable du jour.
But not just cucurbita – also words descended from it. Because who speaks Latin besides botanists and choral singers and certain nerds and the occasional priest? However, Italian comes from Latin, and so does French. Over the centuries, Latin morphed into other languages through mutations both accidental and deliberate. Etymology is like horticulture in that way: people import seeds from a distant place and keep breeding them and making new versions of the plant until they have something that looks quite different from the source.
So this cucurbita got worn down over time, and in France, the second c and the b both got eaten and the t got voiced and it became coourde, which was dragged over to England and the c was voiced and we got gourd. Meanwhile, back in France, the d was softened to a fricative and they ended up with courge. And when, in the 1800s, someone bred a cute little version of a certain summer squash that had been imported from Central America in the 1500s, they added the diminutive -ette. And that’s how you make courgette.
But that diminutive version of the summer squash wasn’t bred in France, and it wasn’t bred in England. It was bred in Italy. And in the evolution from Latin to Italian, this word cucurbita lost the rb and softened the t to an affricate and became cocuzza, which was a name for a gourd and also for your “gourd,” i.e., your head. But the gourd times weren’t over yet: in some parts of Italy, over time, cocuzza became cuzza, and then the consonants swapped and it became zucca. Which is, again, a word for a squash and also, again, your head.
And then, when (as we mentioned above) someone made a smaller version of a certain summer squash – a baby version, we can say – it got the diminutive suffix. And zucca became zucchina – or, in some parts of Italy, the masculine form, zucchino. The plural of which is zucchini.
Which means, yes, if you want to be fussy, you can’t have “one zucchini,” you have “one zucchino.” Only, as anyone who has ever grown them knows, you can’t have one anyway. You always end up with many. It’s like spaghetto: Just ignore the singular, for your own convenience – and mental health.
So there it is. We could have called Cucurbita pepo a gourdette, or gourdlet, or gourdling, or gourdkin, or, um, gourdie (somehow), but we didn’t – although, etymologically, we did. Yes, some English speakers in some places call it a marrow or baby marrow, but it’s not bred in the bone for most of us, so never mind. Since about a century ago, some English speakers have called this plant courgette and some have called it zucchini, and in the end they’re the same thing anyway, even though they’re obviously not the same thing. And what’s the harm in using a word we got from somewhere else for a vegetable we got from somewhere else? It’s true that none of these names have anything to do with what the Cucurbita pepo progenitor was called by the people in Central America who knew it first, but on the other hand, our modern courgette/zucchini is quite different from what they knew too.
And if you slice it thick and fry it in hot oil, it makes a delicious and not-too-soft addition to a pasta sauce. Or you can slice it thin and cover it with olive oil and salt (and maybe a little sugar) and put it on a baking sheet in a very hot oven until it’s crispy, and that’s rather good too. Or have it raw in a salad. However you have it, it’s brain food. My proof? You already know more than you did a few minutes ago because of it.
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