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Summer Squash
Boil, pare and cut into slices three summer squashes. Remove the seeds and cut the slices into squares; put them in a saucepan, cover with boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt and boil twenty minutes. Drain carefully, mash, turn into a strainer cloth and squeeze until the squash is perfectly dry. Now put in a saucepan, add a teaspoonful of butter, half a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper. Stir until the squash is very hot, and serve in a heated vegetable dish.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment of mature summer squash, where the whole point is driving out water. Two details in the text need attention before you start.
- The first word is a printer's slipThe opening word sits oddly with what follows, since the squash is boiled two sentences later. It may be an error for wash, pare and cut — or a compressed instruction to boil whole first; either way, proceed with the boiling described below.
- What "summer squash" meantIn this period it usually meant a crookneck or a scallop (pattypan) type, often picked large enough to have toughened skin and developed seeds — hence the paring and seeding. A modern young zucchini or yellow squash needs neither; the recipe gives no weights, so judge by volume rather than counting squashes.
- Twenty minutes is for old squashThat time suits thick-walled mature flesh. Young supermarket squash is soft in six to eight minutes, and twenty will leave you with grey mush that still has to be wrung out.
- The hinge is the squeezingSummer squash is roughly 95 percent water, and the dish stands or falls on how dry you get it. Twist it hard in a cloth or press it in a sieve with the back of a ladle until no more liquid runs; underdo this and the butter will not bind and the dish weeps in the serving bowl.
- A gentler route to the same endSalting the raw slices for half an hour and pressing them draws out much of the water before cooking, which spares the flavour that twenty minutes of boiling water carries off.
- Seasoning is deliberately bareA teaspoon of butter for three squashes is thin by current taste. Two to three tablespoons, plus nutmeg or a little grated onion cooked in the butter, suits modern palates.
- YieldServes four as a side dish.
Summer squash is one of the New World cucurbits, grown in North America long before European settlement and eaten young, while the rind is still soft — as distinct from the winter squashes stored whole into the cold months. Boiled-and-mashed preparations like this one fill the vegetable chapters of American cookbooks through the nineteenth century, when squash was picked larger and later than we pick it now and arrived in the kitchen with seeds to scoop and skin to pare. The insistence on wringing the pulp dry in a cloth is the signature of the period: with a household expectation that vegetables be thoroughly cooked, mechanical pressing was one common defence against a watery dish. The same instruction turns up in contemporary directions for spinach.