Home › Cookery › Cymling Pudding
Cymling Pudding
Boil young cymlings, mash and run through a colander. Add one teacup of milk, three eggs, a large lump of butter, pepper and salt. Put in a buttered deep dish, and bake a light brown. For a change, you might line the dish with thin slices of buttered bread, pour in the cymling batter and put some pieces of butter and grated cracker on top.--Mrs. M. C. C.
A plain summer squash custard from a Virginia household book, written for cooks who already knew what a cymling was and how wet it gets. Two things need attention: the squash must be drained hard, and the measurements are all by eye.
- CymlingA cymling (also cymbling, simlin) is the flat scalloped summer squash sold today as pattypan. Young ones, no bigger than a fist, are what the recipe wants; the skin and seeds of large ones turn woody and stringy. The recipe names no quantity; something in the region of 2 lb trimmed suits a batter of one teacup of milk and three eggs, but judge by eye.
- Drain the squash — this is the hingeBoiled summer squash holds an enormous amount of water, and a wet purée will bake into a weeping, curdled dish rather than a set custard. After mashing and passing through the colander, press the pulp in a sieve or wring it in a towel until it stops running, then let it cool before the eggs go in.
- One teacup of milkA teacup in American books of this period is generally reckoned at about 3/4 cup, not the 8-ounce cup. Given the water still in the squash, err on the low side.
- A large lump of butterRoughly 2 tablespoons. It is there for richness and to keep the surface from drying, not for structure.
- Bake a light brownThe recipe gives no oven direction beyond the colour. Around 350F answers; expect 40 to 50 minutes in a buttered dish, and the custard is done when the centre no longer trembles as a liquid and a knife comes out clean. Browning is the visual cue the original gives, but set matters more.
- Grated crackerDry soda or water crackers grated on a box grater — coarse cracker crumbs. Panko or dried breadcrumbs stand in without complaint.
- The bread-lined variationThin buttered slices laid over the bottom and up the sides of the dish, crust on or off as you like. Slightly stale bread holds up; fresh soft sandwich bread dissolves into the custard.
- YieldServes four to six as a vegetable side. It is a side dish, despite the name — "pudding" was a loose term in this period, applied to savoury baked dishes set with eggs as readily as to sweet or boiled ones.
Cymling is a distinctly Southern word for the scalloped summer squash, one of the native American cucurbits that colonial gardeners took up from Indigenous cultivation along the Atlantic seaboard; the name is usually traced to "simnel," the old English word for a round flat cake, after the squash's shape. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is full of these signed household formulas, contributors credited by name or, as here, by initials. Squash of this kind comes in glut, all at once and all in August, and a dish that turns several pounds of it into a baked custard with milk, eggs and butter is a direct answer to that problem. The bread-lined variation at the end is the same thrift working on yesterday's loaf.