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To Cook Summer Squash
If young and tender, cut into thick slices and boil in as little water as possible, or steam about one hour. Drain well, or better still, squeeze it in a thin cloth. Mash and season with butter, plenty of salt, and a little pepper. If the squash is old, peel and remove the seeds.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment of summer squash: cook it soft, drive off the water, mash with butter. The method still works, but the timing belongs to an older kind of squash and an older idea of doneness.
- Cut the cooking time hardAn hour of steaming reduces young summer squash to grey pulp. Sliced 1 inch thick, it is tender in 8 to 12 minutes steamed, or 5 to 8 minutes in a shallow pan of simmering water.
- The squeeze is the pointSummer squash is upwards of 90 percent water, and the mash will be soup unless that water is removed. Wringing the drained slices in a thin cloth or pressing them firmly in a sieve is what separates this from a watery side dish.
- What "summer squash" meantIn a book of this period the term would cover yellow crookneck and the flat scalloped pattypan. Zucchini can be cooked the same way.
- Old squashThe peeling and seeding instruction is for squash left on the vine until the skin has hardened and the seeds turned woody. Supermarket summer squash is picked young; peel only if the skin is dull and tough.
- Season after draining, not beforeSalting the mash while it is still wet gives a false reading, since the seasoning goes out with the liquid. Add butter, salt and pepper once the squash is dry and hot.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, about 2 lb of squash will make four modest servings once the water is gone.
Mashed summer squash of this kind is common in nineteenth-century American cookery, and squash was a vegetable a household could grow in glut and eat all summer. Squashes are native to the Americas and the word itself comes from a Narragansett term, usually given as askutasquash. The instruction to squeeze the cooked flesh in a cloth recurs in books of this era: boiling or steaming was the usual treatment, and the wringing cloth was the remedy for the liquid it released. The distinction drawn here between young squash and old also suggests cooks working from a garden rather than a shop, taking what the vines gave them at whatever stage it arrived.