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Summer Squash with Melted Butter
Peel, cut in halves, and then into eighths, and again into eighths, two summer squashes. Boil in salt water twenty minutes. Drain, and arrange neatly on a dish of toast. Dust with salt and pepper and serve with a tureen of English drawn butter.
A plain nineteenth-century vegetable dish whose success depends almost entirely on not overcooking the squash and on getting the sauce right.
- Twenty minutes is far too longYoung summer squash in small pieces is tender in 4 to 7 minutes and collapses into wet pulp well before twenty. Boil until a piece yields to a knife tip but still holds its shape, then drain at once. Older, thicker-skinned squash may want a couple of minutes more.
- "English drawn butter" is not melted butter"English drawn butter" is not simply melted butter -- Despite the title, drawn butter in this period usually means a thickened sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, a cup of hot water or cooking liquid whisked in, simmered until smooth, then finished with more butter off the heat. Straight melted butter will slide off and pool.
- The cutting instructionHalves, then eighths, then eighths again reads as absurdly small if taken literally. It may be meant simply as halved lengthwise, then cut across into short thick pieces of roughly even size; aim for pieces about an inch.
- Peeling is optional nowThe squashes of the era were often picked larger with tougher skin. Modern yellow crookneck, straightneck and zucchini under about 8 inches need no peeling, and the skin helps the pieces keep their shape.
- Drain thoroughlySquash is very watery and will thin the sauce and sog the toast. After draining, let it sit in the colander a minute or shake it over low heat to drive off surface moisture.
- The toastThick, firmly toasted white bread, cut to fit the platter. It is there as a sop for the sauce, so toast it dry and dark rather than soft.
- YieldTwo summer squashes serve three or four as a side dish; the sauce quantity above is enough for that amount with a little left in the tureen.
Boiled vegetables served on toast with a flour-thickened butter sauce is a thoroughly English formula that American cookbooks absorbed in the nineteenth century, and "drawn butter" appears beside asparagus, cauliflower, fish and boiled fowl in many books of the period. The name is confusing even in its own time: some writers used it for clarified butter, many others for the flour-bound sauce described here, which is essentially a thin white sauce made with water rather than milk. Summer squash itself is a New World crop, grown by Indigenous farmers long before European contact. The long boiling time is typical of period vegetable cookery generally, and it is the instruction modern practice has most clearly reversed.