Zucchini slice - an Australian thing?
February's Coles Magazine was largely centred on kids lunch boxes - well they have just all gone back to school - adults back to work too I suppose. Anyway the featured front page recipes shown above, were for three different versions of zucchini slice - and you can find the recipes here.
Later in the magazine there is yet another recipe for another version called Freezable zucchini and chorizo slice. And it is something that does pop up here and there all the time. Indeed according to the Taste.com website in 2017 it was by far and away the most sought after recipe on their website - which has thousands and thousands of recipes on it. Who'd have thought?
I believe the recipe that is searched for is actually quite old and is from delicious Magazine. You can find the recipe and a video here. Picture below.
So let's take this as the base recipe, although I believe Margaret Fulton of the Women's Weekly wrote one many years before. It consists of eggs, self-raising flour, zucchini, bacon, onions and cheese all mixed up together poured into a tin and baked. Really, really easy, and it can be eaten hot or cold, with or without a sauce. And, as the Coles examples at the top show and the South Australian mum says - infinitely variable.
Moreover it is the perfect solution for all of those zucchini you have lurking in your fridge or your garden that are about to go mushy and horrible.
"zucchini slice is driven by people having a strong desire to use up leftovers” Adelaide Advertiser
It really is very, very simple and very, very versatile and sort of related to frittata and quiche, besides being basically healthy, so I assumed that it had overseas heritage, and I have tried really, really hard to find it's history. In a brief preface to Stephanie Alexander's recipe she credits it to an Italian immigrant friend of hers, but this is the only reference I have found to Italy, or indeed anywhere else. And to add to my growing conviction that this is indeed an Australian invention I find that in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's otherwise excellent book on leftovers, he does not mention slices of any kind at all. In his section on all the common things you can do with leftovers he talks about omelettes, tortillas, frittata, tarts and pies but does not mention slices at all. I'm even beginning to wonder whether slices in and of themselves are an Australian thing.
I could not find much about the zucchini slice - other than that reference to it being the most popular recipe - and lots of references to it being a nostalgic childhood comfort food thing. All on Australian websites. Yes I know zucchini is called courgette in England, but just about every reference I found to zucchini/courgette slice was Australian. Jamie, Nigella and Delia have nothing. Donna Hay has seven separate recipes. I did find one reference on, I think, an American site which had a recipe from the writer's Greek Australian friend. So there you go - it must be Australian. But still I can't quite believe this. Surely somebody over there has something very similar. Well frittata is similar but it doesn't have flour in it. Ditto for all those other more solid kind of omelettes. Qhiches have flour but only in the pastry case, not in the filling. There are bread recipes, even cakes, but no slices. You would think would you not that if you had got as far as making a cake you would have thought of making a thin cake - for that's really what a slice is.
Indeed Belinda Jefferey's version - that she calls a pie is sort of halfway between a thick cake and a thin slice. Same principle though.
Zucchini slice, can, of course, actually be a carrot slice, or a sweet potato slice or any kind of vegetable slice. You don't really have to have the zucchini. It is rather bland after all. and, yes, I think it is the most common veggie used in this kind of thing because of it's tendency to be on the verge of going off. So well done Australia for inventing something so useful.
If you believed all the foodie magazines and Taste.com you would think that kids love it too - and maybe they do.
And just to show that all things old can be made new, here is Valli Little's modern take on zucchini slice, again from delicious Magazine - well the slice is much the same, but how it is used is not. I think it's called New Zucchini Slice.
Once again, it's all to do with presentation isn't it? Wish I was better at that.
