Who was the first native American to look at a Chesapeake blue crab and exclaim, “Hey, let’s eat that!”? We don’t know. We will probably never know. Nor will food archeologists ever identify the first European to look at a zucchini flower and decide it would be good to eat.
Those are mysteries for the ages.
But, whoever those ancient foodies were, we thank them for establishing the edibility of both the blue crab and the zucchini flower. While the consumption of the Chesapeake crustacean is well known in our region — it’s the first thing the world associates with Baltimore cuisine — less familiar is the use of the yellow zucchini flower in cooking.
I associate it with Italian cuisine because my mother, the late former Rose Popolo, used to gather a fresh bunch from her garden, dip them in batter and fry them for a summer treat. I found it strange, but delicious. Squash blossoms, as well as pumpkin blossoms, are popular in Italy and most of Europe, but they are also found in the kitchens of the Middle East and Central America. In the United Kingdom, they are known as courgette flowers.
To be honest, I had not thought about flowers as food for years until this month, when a friend introduced me to Nicola Colloca, who lives near Baltimore’s Little Italy and is an expert in zucchini blossoms. He tends to urban squash patches here and there, and manages to harvest both the zucchini and the yellow flowers that signal their emergence. His wife, Erminia, cooks them a few different ways — battered-fried, as my mother did, but also mixed into fried dough, or zeppoli. She also adds them to a savory summer vegetable stew.
Some people add the raw flowers to salads.
There’s a science to harvesting fiori di zucchini. Passionate gardeners like Nicola Colloca know that a zucchini plant produces both male and female flowers. The male flowers appear at the end of stems while the female emerges on the actual emerging squash.
The other day, Colloca handed me a female flower, a fragrant yellow blossom atop an emerging squash.
You have to be careful, he said, not to pick all the female flowers if you want your plant to produce squash. And it’s necessary to have a balanced approach to the harvest. “If you are targeting male flowers, always leave some on the plant,” advises Homes & Gardens, the British magazine. “Leave one or two male flowers for every 10 or 12 female flowers to ensure a good level of pollination and lots of fruits.”
A friend from Little Italy, Elia Mannetta, recalls learning about this delicate balance years ago, when his family and others from the neighborhood drove out to a small, pick-your-own vegetable farm near White Marsh.
“We went out there to pick tomatoes to make sauce,” Elia said. “But the farmer — his name was Mr. Green — told my father to tell all the Italians to stay away from the zucchini. He was worried they’d pick all the blossoms and he’d have no squash.”
Elia’s mother, the late Gioconda Mannetta, stuffed the flowers with bread crumbs and cheeses and either baked them or fried them. Colloca mentioned anchovies as one of the ingredients for a stuffing, and online recipes call for stuffings of ricotta, mozzarella and/or prosciutto. (Personally, I never use prosciutto in savory cooking; that finely cured ham is meant for neither oven nor skillet.)
Coda: It seems to me that there’s a practical side to harvesting zucchini flowers. By late summer, some gardeners can feel a bit overwhelmed by the size and abundance of the zucchini they grow — too many to even give away, and not everyone loves it. The solution: Summon Nicola Colloca to harvest some blossoms or learn how to do it yourself. You’ll score a delicacy for dinner while practicing responsible zucchini control.
Dan Rodricks writes his column weekly for Fishbowl. He can be reached at djrodricks@gmail.com or via danrodricks.com
Good to read a Rodricks column again. Thanks, keep writing. We missed you.