A little more than two years ago, I published a not-very-serious piece about zucchinis in murder mysteries. You can find it here. In it, I talked about an obscure mystery by John Rhode called Vegetable Duck in which a maid/cook scrapes out the inside of a zucchini and replaces it with minced mutton, parsley, onion, herbs, and a little dripping, a wartime recipe known as vegetable duck. Sounds tasty, actually!! Right up until it ends up being poisonous to the poor victim.
Well, in that post, I suggested that I wasn’t aware of any specialized tool with which to do that job and, gentle reader, now I am. The illustration nearby is of a zucchini corer that you can currently acquire on Amazon for a fairly reasonable price.
I’m still interested in the rare occurrences of natural poisoning by cucurbitacin, a toxin that naturally occurs in zucchini … but I may just have to get myself a zucchini corer and try a recipe. If you’re interested in a serious look at this book, by the way, my friend John Norris at his blog Pretty Sinister Books did the definitive review in 2012. Hope they bring this back into print some day!!
Noah's Archives 
[…] July 26, 2018: I almost never return to add bits to a previous post, but I thought my readers would be interested to know that there IS such a thing as a zucchini corer, you can buy it on Amazon, and I wrote about it here. […]
While we are being fruity anf flippant, if they are not being referred to as courgettes and the Italian is used, then we should show some respect and spell them “zucchine” for the plural and “zucchina” for the singular. Phew, that feels better. As you were, vegetable pedantry over 😉
I’m prepared to agree, but my local supermarket isn’t. Perhaps this is why Poirot called them “vegetable marrows”. LOL
Oh,, is this what Porot was growing in Roger Ackroyd? I thought he was just growing, y’know, marrows Wait, a marrow is a different thing, right…?
As near as I can tell, Poirot was growing what we would either call zucchini or zucchine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrow_(vegetable)
So zucchini, marrows, and courgettes are the same thing??!? How…how did I not know this?!
I just thought it was one of those “we say elevator they say lift” things. I very much doubt if anyone in North America barring pedants like me would know what a courgette is (except in Quebec where that’s the word).
Sure — I knew zucchini/courgette, but I was totally under the impression that a marrow was a different thing entirely. I. Am. Flabbergasted.
I can’t speak for others, but the first time I encountered “vegetable marrows” — in “Roger Ackroyd”, probably — I just skated past them thinking, “Oh, that’s some old thing I don’t know, not important.” Nowadays we have Wikipedia at hand and I do actually look stuff up LOL.
Ha. Also, doesn’t “vegetable marrow” imply there’s some kind of other marrow out there? Like, a…meat marrow?
Bone marrow?
🤣 This might explain some of the weirder arms of the cooking fraternity…