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To Fry Cymlings
Steam or boil the cymlings (unpeeled), till tender. When cool, slice and butter them, sprinkle pepper and salt and pour over them a spoonful of eggs, lightly, beaten. Sift over it cracker, pounded fine, and fry a light yellow brown. Take from the frying pan, prepare the other side the same way. Return to the pan and fry it a pale brown.--Mrs. S. T.
A two-stage cooked-then-fried squash, essentially a pan-fried cutlet made from precooked pattypan. The instructions assume you will bread one face at a time in the pan, which is the part most likely to confuse.
- What a cymling isCymling (also cymbling, simlin) is the Southern name for pattypan or scallop squash, the flat, scalloped summer squash. Small ones, 3-4 inches across, have tender skin and few seeds; large ones turn watery and fibrous and should be avoided here.
- Cook it dry, not softSteaming is better than boiling for this recipe. Summer squash is mostly water, and a boiled cymling will weep in the frying pan and lift the crumb coating off. Steam until a knife goes in with slight resistance, then cool completely and blot the slices dry.
- Slice thicknessCut across the squash into rounds about half an inch thick. Thinner slices collapse once cooked; thicker ones will not brown through before the coating burns.
- "Butter them"This most likely means spreading soft butter on the cut face rather than melting butter over the slices, the butter helping the egg and crumbs adhere.
- CrackerNineteenth-century cracker crumbs came from plain soda or water crackers pounded in a mortar. Unsalted saltines or plain water biscuits crushed fine are the nearest equivalent; commercial dry breadcrumbs are coarser and will not give the same thin, even crust.
- The one-side-at-a-time methodThe recipe coats and fries a single face, then coats and fries the second, possibly because a cooked slice is too soft to dip whole without breaking. Handle with a wide spatula and turn only once per side.
- Fat and heatMedium heat in butter or a butter-and-oil mix, about 2-3 minutes a side. "Light yellow brown" and "pale brown" both mean stopping short of deep colour; the squash is already cooked and you are only setting the crust.
- YieldFour small cymlings give roughly a dozen slices, enough for four as a side dish. Serve hot from the pan, as the crust softens quickly.
Cymlings appear constantly in Virginia and Carolina cookery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, boiled, stewed with bacon fat, mashed with butter, or fried like this. The squash itself is American, one of the scallop-type gourds grown by Indigenous farmers long before European settlement, and the odd name is generally traced to "simnel," an English cake whose flat, round shape the squash resembles. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, is full of these initialled attributions -- "Mrs. S. T." and her neighbours were the book's real authors. The technique here, precooking a soft vegetable and then crumbing and frying it, was one way of making a garden glut into something substantial enough to sit beside meat at dinner.