Home › CHAPTER XI › CHAPTER XI: Squash
CHAPTER XI: Squash
STEAMED SQUASH Prepare as for boiling. As the squash is cooked over and not in the water, a longer time for cooking is required. Season and finish as Boiled Squash. BAKED SQUASH If the shell is not too hard, the squash may be cut in pieces about the size of a potato. Remove seeds and stringy portions, then set to bake on the grate of an oven suitable in temperature for baking potatoes. The squash will bake in about forty minutes. Remove to a hot dish. Serve and eat as baked potatoes. Baked squash is particularly good with beefsteak.
Two brief methods from a chapter that assumes you already know the boiled version. Both are written for hard winter squash — Hubbard, turban, marrow — not the summer squash of July.
- "An oven suitable for baking potatoes"In modern terms a hot oven, somewhere around 400F. At that heat cut pieces of winter squash take roughly the forty minutes given, longer if the flesh is very thick or the pieces larger than a medium potato.
- Cut side up, on the rackSetting the pieces directly on the oven grate lets moisture escape and concentrates the flavour, which is the whole point of baking rather than boiling. A sheet pan underneath catches drips without steaming the squash.
- "Prepare as for boiling"Presumably peeling or paring hard-shelled squash, removing seeds and strings, and cutting it into uniform pieces. For steaming, skin-on wedges hold together better than peeled cubes.
- Steaming timeExpect 20–30 minutes over rapidly boiling water for pieces two inches across, tested with a knife tip. The claim that steaming takes longer than boiling holds, but not dramatically so with a tight-fitting lid.
- Season and finishThe boiled-squash instruction being referred back to would cover butter, salt and pepper, and driving off any excess water. Steamed squash carries much less water than boiled and rarely needs draining.
- Which squashHubbard was a common New England keeper in this period and has a shell hard enough to explain why the recipe hedges about cutting it. Butternut, kabocha and acorn all behave the same way in the oven; acorn halves fit the "size of a potato" description almost exactly.
- YieldFor two people, about 1 1/2 lb of untrimmed winter squash — roughly one small acorn squash, halved — gives two generous portions.
Cooking for Two belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century books written for small households. Squash earned its own chapter because it was a staple of the New England winter cellar: hard-shelled varieties like the Hubbard, widely grown in Massachusetts from the mid-nineteenth century, would keep for months in a cool dry room and were among the few vegetables available fresh in February. The instruction to eat baked squash "as baked potatoes" reflects how ordinary the vegetable was as everyday starch rather than a holiday sweetened side. The pairing with beefsteak is a period judgment worth taking seriously; the caramelised edges of dry-baked squash sit better against beef than the watery boiled version the chapter treats as the default.