Home › Cookery › Cymling Fritters
Cymling Fritters
After boiling and running through a colander, mix with an egg, season with salt, pepper, and butter, make into cakes and fry a light brown.
A terse mid-nineteenth-century note that assumes you already know what a cymling is and how to fry a cake. The whole success of it lies in getting the squash dry.
- CymlingAn old Virginia and Carolina name for the pattypan or scallop squash, the flat scalloped summer squash sold as pattypan or sunburst. Any young summer squash works; pick small ones with soft seeds.
- Drain hardThis is the hinge. Boiled summer squash is mostly water, and pushing it through a colander does not remove that water. After mashing, salt it and let it sit in a sieve or twist it in a clean towel, then cook off the remaining moisture in a dry pan until the mass holds its shape. Wet purée will not form cakes and will spit in the fat.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For roughly 1 1/2 lb of squash (about 1 1/2 cups of drained purée), one egg, a tablespoon of butter, and salt and pepper to taste are in proportion. That makes eight to ten small cakes, enough for four as a side dish.
- A binderThe original relies on egg alone, which is thin. Two to four tablespoons of flour, fine cracker crumbs, or cornmeal stirred in will let you shape the cakes, though the recipe as written calls for none.
- Running through a colanderMeans forcing the cooked squash through the perforations with a spoon or pestle to make a coarse purée and hold back skin and seeds. A food mill or a potato masher and a sieve does the same job. Avoid a food processor, which turns it to liquid.
- FryingShallow-fry in butter or a butter and oil mix over medium heat, about three minutes a side until light brown. "Light brown" is the period cue for done; press the cakes only once, when you turn them.
- ServingA vegetable side, not a sweet fritter. Good with ham, fried chicken, or anything else the book serves in high summer, which is when cymlings are in.
Cymling, also written simmlin, cymbling and simlin, is the Southern name for the scallop squash, and is often said to derive from simnel, a round flat cake the squash was thought to resemble, though the etymology is traditional rather than established. The squash itself is a New World cultivar, grown in the Chesapeake long before English cookery books admitted it. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by more than two hundred Virginia housekeepers and first published in 1878, is full of these compressed notes: the contributor wrote down only what a fellow cook might not guess.