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Winter Squash
The squash is a kind of gourd, which is cultivated in America as an article of food. To dress it, pare a large yellow squash, remove the strings and seeds from the inside, and cut it into small pieces. Put these into a stewpan, pour upon them as much hot water as will cover them, and simmer gently till tender. Drain them in a colander, and mash them till quite smooth. Season the mash with pepper and salt, and mix a slice of fresh butter into it. Put it into a tureen, dot it over with small spots of pepper, garnish with sprigs of parsley, and serve. Time to simmer the squash, half an hour or more.
A plain boiled-and-mashed squash, written for British cooks who had probably never seen one. The method works, but modern squash varieties and modern taste both call for a lighter hand with the water.
- Which squash"A large yellow squash" here means a hard winter squash of the pumpkin family — butternut, kabocha, crown prince or a small culinary pumpkin all suit. It is not the soft yellow summer squash sold under that name in American shops today, which needs only a few minutes' cooking.
- Steam rather than floodCovering the pieces with water waterlogs the flesh and leaches out the sweetness. Use an inch of water in a covered pan, or steam over water, and the mash will need no draining and no reduction.
- TimingHalf an hour is right for 2-inch chunks of a dense squash such as kabocha; butternut in 1-inch pieces is tender in 12 to 15 minutes. Test with a knife tip rather than the clock.
- Dry the mashAfter mashing, return it to the dry pan over low heat and stir for a minute or two until it stops steaming heavily. This is the difference between a mash that holds a spoon and one that weeps water into the tureen.
- "A slice of fresh butter"Read this as about 1 oz (30 g) per pound of cooked flesh. "Fresh" means unsalted — Victorian butter was often heavily salted for keeping, so adjust your own salt accordingly.
- A tureenA deep serving dish, usually lidded. Any warmed lidded dish does the job; warm it, or the first spoonful will be tepid.
- The garnish"Small spots of pepper" appears to mean pepper scattered in a pattern over the smoothed surface, decorative rather than for seasoning, since the mash has already been peppered; the recipe does not say which pepper or how coarsely ground. Skip it if you have already peppered the mash to taste.
- YieldA 3 lb squash yields roughly 2 lb of prepared flesh, enough for six as a side dish.
The book treats the squash as a curiosity: "cultivated in America as an article of food" is the language of a British reference work explaining a vegetable its readers were unlikely to find at market. Squashes and pumpkins are New World cucurbits, domesticated in Mesoamerica and among the oldest cultivated plants in the Americas; the word squash is generally traced to a Narragansett term, often given as askutasquash, borrowed by English settlers in New England. They reached Europe in the sixteenth century, where they were often grown as fodder or eaten in hard times rather than valued as a table vegetable, which may be why a vegetable long familiar in America still needed a paragraph of introduction for a British readership. The treatment given here and, peppered, is close to the plain American handling of the vegetable, without the sugar and spice that would have turned it into pie filling.