Rachel Roddy’s recipe for frying pan courgette parmigiana | A kitchen in Rome

Normally you’d bake or deep-fry parmigiana di zucchini, but here’s a novel way to make it in a frying pan

I first ate this dish, cooked in this way, on a campsite in Puglia. The cook was the Scottish husband of a Sicilian surgeon, while the frying pan, having lost its plastic handle on a previous holiday, was moved on and off the small Primus stove with surgical forceps. Necessity drove the cooking and the parmigiana di zucchine was made in one pan over a low flame.

As with aubergine parmigiana, a common way to prepare courgette for parmigiana di zucchine is to dredge the courgette slices in flour, then to deep-fry them. Alternatively, brush the slices with oil and griddle or bake. Wonderful ways both, but neither ideal for camping. Some recipes suggest raw courgette as a solution, but the problem with that is that, regardless of how thinly it is cut, the courgette always remains slightly raw and green tasting. The answer to all the above, and one suggested by the surgeon, is to fry the potato-peeler strips of courgette in a small amount of olive oil before layering – not to cook or brown them, but simply to fry off the rawness so they turn floppy and opaque, also tangled, like unravelled ribbons, but easily untangled.

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