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Summer Squash Fried
Slice the squash, dip in beaten egg, season well with pepper and salt, roll in flour, and fry in hot butter or lard.
A four-line recipe that assumes you know how to handle a watery vegetable. The technique is sound; the omissions are salting, drainage and pan temperature.
- Which squash"Summer squash" in an American book of this period generally means the pattypan or crookneck sorts, picked young with soft skin and undeveloped seeds. Zucchini works as a modern substitute. Do not peel a young squash; the skin holds the slice together in the pan.
- Slice thicknessQuarter-inch rounds cook through in the time the crust takes to brown. Thicker slices leave a raw, squeaking centre under a finished coating.
- Draw the water firstThe instruction the original leaves out. Salt the slices, spread them on a rack or in a colander for 20-30 minutes, then blot dry. Wet squash steams the coating off itself and the flour turns to paste.
- Order of the coatingAs written, egg comes before flour, which gives a thin, patchy crust. Flouring first, then egg, then flour again gives a coating that stays put; if you follow the book exactly, press the floured slices firmly and let them sit a few minutes before frying.
- Fat and heat"Hot butter" alone will brown and burn before the squash colours. Use lard, or butter cut with a neutral oil, at about 350F -- a pinch of flour should sizzle at once without smoking.
- TimingTwo to three minutes a side. Squash collapses quickly, and a slice fried until deeply browned all over will be limp inside.
- YieldTwo medium summer squash, about a pound, serve three or four as a side dish. Fry in batches and hold on a rack in a low oven; stacking on paper steams the crust soft.
Summer squash is one of the few genuinely American vegetables in the book -- the Cucurbita pepo group was domesticated in Mesoamerica and grown across the eastern woodlands long before European settlement, and the word itself comes from a Narragansett term generally given as askutasquash. Because the fruit is picked immature and keeps badly, it was a garden vegetable rather than a market one for most of the nineteenth century, which is why turn-of-the-century cookbooks treat it so briefly: the assumption is a kitchen garden in July with more squash than anyone knows what to do with. Frying in egg and flour was a common treatment for mild summer vegetables in this period, applied to eggplant, green tomatoes and cucumber as well.