The zucchini is an American squash reinvented in nineteenth-century Milan
Squashes were first domesticated in Mexico and Central America more than 7,000 years ago, yet the slim green zucchini is a surprisingly recent invention. Northern Italian growers bred it in the late nineteenth century, and it first appears under that name in a book published in Milan in 1901.
Botanically the zucchini is a variety of Cucurbita pepo, a summer squash picked while its seeds and skin are still soft. Left alone, the fruit can approach a metre long and turn into what the British call a marrow, but cooks usually harvest it at 15 to 25 centimetres. Technically it is a berry with a hardened rind. Fruits sold with their flowers still attached are prized as the freshest and sweetest. Occasionally a zucchini turns intensely bitter from toxic cucurbitacins, which can cause serious stomach upsets; stressed growing conditions or crossing with ornamental gourds are typical triggers.
The name is Italian: zucchino is a diminutive of zucca, meaning gourd or squash. Standard Italian prefers the feminine zucchina, and Pellegrino Artusi's 1891 cookbook used it, but North Americans adopted the Tuscan masculine plural. The French word courgette, used in Britain too, is a twentieth-century coinage from the old word courge. South Africans also say baby marrow. An early English travel book described it as an odd little squash, tender and tasty.
Italian immigrants almost certainly brought it to the United States, probably first growing it in California; records begin in the early 1920s. Britain was slower. Elizabeth David recalled that in 1954 courgettes were rare, pricey imports from France. A Surrey nursery began growing them for the British market in 1957, and by 2005 a poll of 2,000 people ranked the courgette the country's tenth favourite vegetable.
Many cuisines now use it. It is essential to ratatouille, the slow-cooked vegetable stew from near Nice. Lebanese cooks core it and fill it with rice and spiced beef for kousa mahshi, while Sephardic Jewish medias pairs stuffed halves with a sour lemon sauce.
Source: Zucchini
