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Souffled Squash
Take medium-sized Hubbard squash, remove seeds and stringy portion, and pare. Place in steamer and cook over boiling water for 30 minutes. Mash and season with Crisco, salt and pepper to taste. To 2 cups of the mashed squash, add gradually 1 cup cream, when blended, yolks of 2 well beaten eggs, and finally the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs. Pour into Criscoed souffle dish and bake in moderate oven till firm. Serve at once.
A straightforward vegetable soufflé that leans on the squash itself for body rather than a flour-based béchamel. The original gives no oven number, no dish size and no timing for the bake, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The hinge: drain the squashHubbard is watery, and steaming adds more. After mashing, return the purée to a dry pan over medium heat and stir until it stops steaming and holds a shape on the spoon. Wet squash will not set, no matter how long it bakes.
- Moderate oven350F. In a 1.5-quart dish the soufflé takes 35 to 45 minutes; it is done when the edges are set and the centre barely trembles. Bake it in the lower third so the top does not colour before the middle firms.
- CriscoVegetable shortening, and the reason this book exists. Butter is the better choice for both the seasoning and the greased dish, at roughly 2 tablespoons in the squash and enough to coat the dish.
- CreamA full cup of cream to 2 cups of squash is a very loose mixture by modern standards. Heavy cream gives the firmest result; reducing it to 1/2 or 2/3 cup produces a soufflé that rises more reliably.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites to soft, glossy peaks rather than dry ones, and fold in two additions with a spatula. Whites beaten stiff and dry break into lumps that leave streaks and holes.
- Squash sizeA "medium" Hubbard can run to 8 lb or more, far more than this recipe needs. Roughly a pound of pared, seeded flesh yields the 2 cups called for; butternut substitutes directly and is easier to peel, as will kabocha, though its skin is no kinder than Hubbard's.
- Yield and timingServes four as a side dish. "Serve at once" is literal — it begins sinking within a few minutes of leaving the oven, so have the table sitting before it comes out.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, introduced in 1911 as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening; nearly every recipe in the book calls for it, which is why the fat appears here in a dish that would traditionally have used butter. The soufflé -- the name is simply the past participle of souffler, to blow or puff -- is a French technique that American cookbooks of the period applied enthusiastically to vegetables as a way of turning a plain mash into a company dish. Hubbard squash, a hard winter variety generally traced to New England seed trade in the mid-nineteenth century, kept for months in a cellar, which made it one of the few keeping vegetables available for a February or March dinner in the era this calendar was written for.