Veg to Table: Courgette
By: Jess Hardiman
Tags: Recipe, Seasons, Food, Vegetables, Summer

Illustration: Ellen Blanc

Courgettes are one of the ultimate symbols of warmer times, straddling the summer months of June, July, August and early September before bowing out as the leaves begin to fall. But while many of us tend to eat a lot of them, we tend to assume their mild taste can’t always lead the way in a dish, leaving them to be chopped up and thrown into a jumble alongside a handful of other ingredients.

However, I’d argue that what a courgette lacks in oomph, it more than makes up for in versatility, lending itself well to both flavour and texture. Once the delicate flowers have been stuffed and deep fried, you’re left with the plants to play around with — griddling on the barbeque to bring out a charred, almost bitter note, shaving them raw into a salad for a slight crunch, frying matchstick lengths into the endlessly moreish zucchini fritti, pairing them with mint and lemon for vibrancy, or capitalising on the soft, silky flesh by blitzing them into a smooth soup.

One thing’s for sure, though: you will never, never find me turning any into courgetti, a harrowing trend of the early-to-mid 2010s which saw people replace carbs with courgette in a bid to be healthier — only to realise they were still hungry 10 minutes later, soon reaching for a Mars Bar. Anything that demonises pasta won’t ever be okay with me, and that’s that. Even Nigella admitted her spiraliser had sat unloved and unused in the back of her cupboard, before it was eventually dusted off to make shoestring fries.

Admittedly, one downside to courgettes is that plants tend to produce A LOT, meaning those who grow their own are often left jaded within no time — especially once the flamboyant flowers have been used up. But there are ways to harness the flexible nature of the vegetable to help keep the love alive, as with the recipes below.

Courgette Salad

Courgette salad — with some added shaved fennel — awaiting some merguez sausages on a balcony in Montpelier two summers ago

Out of everything I eat, this is probably the single dish I make most frequently, and while it is the easiest, oddly it’s also the one that people seem to respond to most when I lay it down on the table — often asking me for a recipe that barely exists, because it is embarrassingly straightforward.

It’s based very loosely on a recipe from Jamie Oliver’s 30 Minute Meals, in which strips of courgette are tossed with lemon, chilli and mint, and topped with bocconcini cheese. Trying the dish out many years ago marked my first foray into raw courgettes, and I never looked back — although these days I like to keep things simple, making the vegetable into an easy side that can be assembled at any time, with little effort.

In asking almost nothing of you by way of ingredients or effort, it is the perfect summer dish to whip up at barbeques or as part of a spread while on holiday, being totally achievable even when the sun has pickled your brainpower after a day at the beach.

2 courgettes

1 lemon

1 tbsp olive oil

Salt and pepper

Zest and juice the lemon straight into a serving bowl and add the olive oil, salt and pepper, stirring to mix.

Using a speed peeler, peel the courgette lengthways to create long strips. Get as much out of it as you can before reaching the watery core, which can be saved to throw into something else another time, and add the strips into a serving bowl.

If you’re serving straight away, toss everything to coat the vegetables in the dressing — the acid in the lemon juice will start to break the courgette fibres down slightly, while retaining some crunch. If you’re not eating it for a while, simply throw the vegetables into the bowl but hold off tossing, leaving the dressing sitting underneath or on the side until you’re ready for it. Alternatively, you can prepare an hour or two ahead if you want a much softer, lightly pickled salad, which is just as nice in certain contexts.

Courgette Agrodolce

I’ve had the recipe for Courgette Agrodolce saved for ages, having spotted it on Olive magazine’s website a while back. It comes from The Picklery, a ‘fermenting kitchen and wine bar’ from East London restaurant Little Duck — which makes sense, given the amount of punchy vinegar in the dish.

This week I finally gave it a go, frying off thick rounds of courgette until blistered and golden, before cooking off the onion and garlic with red wine vinegar, sugar and chilli for the sweet-and-sour vibe that the ‘agrodolce’ name warrants. I ended up throwing in some capers as well, as they seem to end up in practically every meal I eat, and I also lobbed some toasted breadcrumbs on top with the mint leaves for some added texture, tucking in with some steamed brown rice.

Courgette Fritters

Courgettes and fennel from my auntie’s allotment two years ago

I first had these fritters at my auntie’s house, when she was trying to use up a glut of courgettes from her allotment one summer — much to the dismay of her partner, who is something of a vegetable-phobe. While he scoffed at the idea of our light summer dinner, I felt intrigued by the combination of grated courgette, feta and mint as she fried them in batches, and was instantly bowled over by the result as I tasted them.

The recipe comes from 2002’s Nigella Summer, but is also available online, with Lawson writing: “I know the word fritter conjures up a complex world of deep-frying and dense-eating, but these are light, simple babies — just grated courgettes, mixed with feta, herbs and spring onions, stirred up with flour and eggs and dolloped into a frying pan to make little vegetable pancakes which, unlike most fried food, are best eaten not straight out of the pan, but left to cool to room temperature.

“This takes any slaving over a hot stove element out of the equation: you just spoon serenely away over your pan before anyone’s around.”

After all these years, they’re something I still make, always conjuring up fond memories of my auntie’s sprawling allotment from whence they came.

Oven Roasted Pesto Zucchini

This vegan recipe from Bryant Terry is inspired by a dish from Chad that pairs roasted courgettes with peanuts, this version jazzing the premise up with a collard-peanut pesto. The recipe — published in his book Vegetable Kingdom: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes — has been shared on the Vogue website, where Terry says: “This recipe is inspired by courgettes avec des arachides (French for ‘zucchini with peanuts’), a classic dish from the north-central African country Chad.”

Pasta with Mint and Pecorino

Pasta with Mint and Pecorino in September 2017, with an old favourite dinner companion. RIP, Jas.

This is one of those dishes that truly is so much more than the sum of its parts, and a perfect example of my favourite kind of pasta dish — one that’s fresh and simple, without the burden of a heavy sauce.

The recipe comes from pasta queen Rachel Roddy, who fries garlic and thin rounds of courgettes in olive oil and tosses through cooked pasta, adding torn fresh mint and pecorino. She uses spaghetti, but I always love matching the courgette slices with rotelle, which resemble wheels with spokes. I also almost always end up throwing some lemon zest in there, purely for good measure.

Courgette and Mint Soup

A classic courgette recipe among my family is this soup, which I first had on holiday in Devon when I was younger. My elder siblings were at the age where you don’t always stick around for the entire family holiday, slinking off back home to see their friends (or do anything but hang out with their little sister), meaning I was left to go out for dinner with my parents, my auntie and her partner — and feeling very grown up, too, as we ordered a starter and a main, which I hadn’t done before.

For our starters, my dad and I had the courgette and mint soup, and loved it so much that my mum recreated it at home — frying off an onion, a potato and four or five large courgettes in butter until soft, throwing in a couple of pints of vegetable stock and leaving to simmer, before blitzing it all into gorgeously green submission with a bunch of mint leaves. More recently, they’ve taken to adding a small knob of ginger, too, which I’m told just adds that ‘little something’.