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Winter Squash
Cut up, take out inside, pare the pieces and stew in as little water as possible, cook an hour, mash in kettle, and if watery, let stand on the fire a few moments, stirring until dry; season with butter, cream, salt and pepper; be careful that it does not burn. Winter squashes are also cooked by cutting in pieces without paring, baking, and serving like potatoes; or they may be cooked in a steamer, and served either in the shell, or scraped out, put in pan, mashed, and seasoned with butter, cream, salt and pepper, and then made hot and served.
A straightforward set of three methods — stewed and mashed, baked in the shell, or steamed — from an era when hard winter squash was cellar staple rather than seasonal novelty. The only real difficulty is water.
- Which squash"Winter squash" in an Ohio kitchen of the 1870s meant Hubbard, turban or crookneck types with hard rinds and dense flesh. Butternut, kabocha and red kuri all behave the same way; spaghetti squash does not and will not mash.
- The hinge: as little water as possibleSquash is mostly water already, so any liquid you add has to be driven off again. Use a half inch in a heavy pot with the lid on and let the squash steam in its own moisture rather than boiling in a bath.
- An hour is longPeeled two-inch pieces are tender in 20 to 30 minutes. The full hour reflects wood-fired ranges with uneven heat and older, tougher field squash; check with a knife tip instead of watching the clock.
- Drying the mashThe instruction to stand it on the fire and stir until dry is what separates good mashed squash from soup. Keep the heat low and the spoon moving, which is also why the recipe cautions that it must not burn.
- Baking temperatureThe book gives none. Cut side down on an oiled pan at 400F for 40 to 50 minutes gives a drier, sweeter result than any wet method, since the moisture evaporates instead of pooling.
- Cream and butterCream skimmed at home was generally richer than today's half-and-half and often closer to heavy cream, though the fat content varied a good deal. Two tablespoons butter and a splash of heavy cream per pound of cooked flesh is about the right register.
- YieldA 3 lb squash yields roughly 2 lb of trimmed flesh, enough mashed squash for four to six as a side dish.
- PeelingParing raw Hubbard is genuinely hard work. The baked and steamed methods here exist partly to avoid it, and scraping cooked flesh from the shell with a spoon is far easier than fighting the rind with a knife.
Buckeye Cookery grew out of a compilation made in Marysville, Ohio, which appeared in 1876 as the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book and was reissued in revised form as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping in 1877, and its vegetable chapter reads like an inventory of what a Midwestern cellar actually held through winter. Winter squashes he squsquashes cultivated in the Americas long before European contact \\ kept for months in a cool dry room without canning, drying or brining, which made them one of a handful of cellar keepers — alongside potatoes, cabbage, turnips, carrots and onions — still genuinely fresh in February. That the book gives times only loosely, directing the cook to "cook an hour" without temperatures, is characteristic: a cook working over a wood range judged doneness by feel, and the recipe's real content is the repeated warning about excess water and scorching, the two things that go wrong.