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Steamed Squash
Cut a marrow squash in slices, remove the seeds and stringy portions, pare and lay in a steamer. Cook over boiling water until tender. Drain perfectly dry. Mash and season with butter, salt, pepper and a little sugar. Serve hot with tiny dots of butter over top.
A plain steamed winter squash purée, straightforward to reproduce once you know what the squash is. The one thing that decides whether it succeeds is how dry you get it before mashing.
- Marrow squashIn an American book of this period this most likely means Boston Marrow, a large orange-fleshed autumn squash, rather than the British vegetable marrow (a summer squash). Hubbard, kabocha, red kuri or butternut all give a similar dense, sweet flesh.
- Drain perfectly dryThis is the hinge. Steamed squash holds a great deal of water, and mashing it wet gives a soupy purée that no amount of butter will save. Let the slices sit in the steamer basket off the heat for a few minutes, then dry them briefly in a wide pan over low heat before mashing.
- ParingPeeling raw winter squash is hard work and unnecessary. Steam the slices skin-on and scoop the flesh away once tender, which is quicker and wastes less.
- TimingSliced about an inch thick, most winter squash is tender in 20 to 30 minutes over boiling water. Test with a knife tip rather than the clock; hubbard and Boston Marrow types vary a good deal in density.
- The sugarTake "a little" as no more than a teaspoon for a medium squash, meant to lift a bland specimen rather than sweeten the dish. Modern kabocha and butternut are often sweet enough that you may want none at all.
- YieldA 3 lb squash yields about 4 cups of mashed flesh, enough for six as a side dish. Butter to taste, but a generous 2 to 3 tablespoons mashed in is in keeping with the original.
Winter squash was one of the few vegetables an American household could count on through December without a can or a hothouse, which is why it turns up in the winter menus of books like this one. The Boston Marrow was among the best-known market squashes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, valued for keeping in a cool cellar for months and for flesh dry and sweet enough to mash without turning watery. Recipes of the period often treat it much as they treat sweet potato, finishing it with butter, salt and a pinch of sugar and sending it to table as a plain accompaniment to a roast. That squash is a New World plant, long grown across North America before European settlement, is well documented; the habit of buttering and lightly sweetening it seems to have been a widespread one.