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Steamed Summer Squash
Wash and cut in quarters. Cook in boiling salted water until tender. Drain through double cheese cloth. Pass through ricer or mash with potato masher, and season with butter, salt and a little black pepper. Reheat and serve.
A plain treatment of summer squash that depends almost entirely on getting the water out. The recipe is titled "steamed" but directs boiling; the draining step is what saves it.
- The hinge is the drainingSummer squash is more than 90 percent water, and boiled squash that goes to the table undrained is soup. Let it sit in the cheesecloth several minutes and press gently; a fine sieve set over a bowl does the same job.
- Or actually steam itGiven the title, quartered squash in a steamer basket over an inch of boiling water for 8 to 10 minutes gives a firmer, less waterlogged result than boiling and gets you to the same place with less to drain.
- What "summer squash" meantIn an American book of this period this generally means yellow crookneck or straightneck, occasionally pattypan. Zucchini works but was not common in American markets then; it needs a shorter cook.
- Size mattersUse squash under about 8 inches. Larger ones have developed seeds and a spongy core, both of which should be scooped out before cooking or the purée turns stringy.
- Tender, not collapsedQuartered squash needs roughly 10 to 12 minutes in boiling salted water. Cook it to falling apart and you lose what little structure the mash has.
- SeasoningBe generous with the butter, 2 to 3 tablespoons per 2 pounds of squash, since the flesh is bland and watery. Salt after draining, not before, or you will judge it wrong.
- YieldTwo pounds of squash, about three medium, reduces to roughly three cups of mash and serves four as a side.
Summer squash is one of the New World cucurbits that entered European and colonial cooking early and never left the American kitchen garden; the word itself comes from a Narragansett term, generally given as askutasquash, meaning something eaten green or uncooked. Its appearance here is simple seasonality: crookneck squash comes in fast and heavily in late summer, and a household with a garden would have had more of it than it knew what to do with. The mashing and ricing treatment reflects a period preference, visible in books of this era, for reducing vegetables to a smooth pur hat that owed something to French kitchen practice and something to the belief that soft vegetables were easier to digest.