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Cymlings Fried with Bacon
Fry some slices of fat bacon in a pan. Remove the bacon when done and keep hot. Fry in the gravy some cymlings that have been boiled tender and cut in slices. While frying, mash fine with a large spoon, and add pepper and salt. Fry brown, and serve with the bacon, if you like.--Mrs. G. B.
A plain skillet dish that depends entirely on driving the water out of the squash. The original assumes you know that boiled summer squash is very wet and will steam rather than brown unless you push it.
- What a cymling isCymling (also cymbling, simlin) is the old Southern name for pattypan squash, the flat scalloped summer squash. Any young summer squash works; yellow crookneck or small zucchini behave the same way.
- Drain them hardBoil the squash whole or halved only until a knife goes in easily, then drain in a colander and let them sit several minutes. Squash held in its own cooking water will never fry brown.
- Fat baconThe recipe means fatty side meat or streak-o'-lean, cut thick, rendered to give a generous pool of grease. Modern thin-sliced bacon yields perhaps 2 tablespoons per 4 slices; add a spoonful of lard or oil if the pan looks dry.
- "Fry in the gravy"Gravy here is the rendered bacon fat and browned bits in the pan, not a thickened sauce. Keep the heat at medium-high so the squash sizzles from the moment it goes in.
- Mashing while fryingThis is the hinge. Breaking the slices down against the pan releases their water so it can evaporate, and the exposed pulp is what catches and browns. Resist stirring constantly; let a crust form, then turn.
- SeasoningSalt at the end rather than the beginning, since the bacon fat is already salty and early salt draws still more water out of the squash. The recipe calls only for pepper and salt.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a working guide, about 2 lb of squash and 6 slices of bacon serves four as a side dish. Cook it in two batches rather than crowding one skillet.
Cymling is a distinctly Southern and Mid-Atlantic word for pattypan squash, one of the squashes cultivated in North America long before European settlement and adopted early into colonial kitchen gardens; the name is sometimes said, though the derivation is disputed, to come from "simnel," for the flat round cake the squash resembles. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered recipes from a network of Virginia housewives and signs them with initials, as here with Mrs. G. B. The dish itself belongs to the summer glut: cymlings come in faster than a household can eat them, and frying them down in bacon grease turns a watery vegetable into something substantial. Pairing garden produce with cured pork is the organizing principle of a great deal of Southern cooking, and it reflects a period when salted side meat was the fat always at hand in the kitchen.