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To Cook Cymblings
Put the cymblings in boiling water, or in a steamer over boiling water; boil until tender-then mash well and stew in cream and butter. Season with salt and pepper.
A short Southern method for summer squash that assumes you know what a cymbling is. The whole dish turns on getting the water out before the cream goes in.
- What a cymbling isCymbling (also cymling, simlin) is the old Southern name for pattypan squash, the flat scalloped summer squash. Any young summer squash works, but pattypans are the intended vegetable. Small ones, three inches or less across, need no peeling or seeding.
- The hinge: drain hardSummer squash is mostly water, and mashed squash stewed straight into cream turns to soup. Drain in a colander after boiling, press with the back of a spoon or squeeze in a towel, then mash. Steaming rather than boiling gives you far less water to fight.
- TimingWhole small pattypans steam tender in 12 to 15 minutes, halved or sliced in 8 to 10. Test with a knife tip; overcooked squash falls apart and releases still more liquid.
- Stewing in cream"Stew" here is probably a few minutes in a shallow pan over moderate heat until the cream thickens around the squash, rather than a long simmer; the recipe gives no time. The original specifies no quantities, but roughly 1/4 cup heavy cream and 2 tablespoons butter per pound of squash is a workable starting point.
- Cream then, cream nowCream in older recipes was unstandardised and often thicker than today's supermarket cream. Heavy cream is the safer choice; half-and-half and light cream are more likely to break or stay thin when reduced.
- SeasoningSalt after draining, not before, and be generous, since squash and cream are both bland. A scrape of nutmeg or a little grated onion cooked in the butter is not out of keeping with creamed vegetable dishes of the era, though the recipe calls for neither.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. Two pounds of squash prepared this way will serve about four as a side dish.
Cymbling is an old Americanism for a vegetable: the scalloped summer squash was grown by Native farmers in the Southeast long before European settlement, and the name is usually traced, tentatively, to "simnel," an English cake whose flat, round shape the squash is said to resemble. It appears in Southern household books through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, often boiled and mashed as here, or fried in batter. That a cookbook could print the word with no gloss suggests how far regional American cooking was still written for people who already knew the produce. The cream-and-butter finish is a common nineteenth-century treatment for watery vegetables, the same logic behind creamed onions, creamed spinach and creamed corn.