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Baked Squash
Cut in pieces for serving. Remove seeds and stringy portion, brush with molasses, season with salt and pepper. Bake until soft, add butter, and serve in shell.
A bare-bones method for winter squash that assumes the cook knows what "until soft" looks like. A few specifics fill the gaps.
- Squash to useThis is written for hard winter squash — Hubbard, buttercup or acorn — not summer squash, which has no shell to serve in. A 3 to 4 lb squash cut into serving wedges feeds four to six.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 375F, cut side up, on a sheet pan. Wedges of an inch or two thick take 40 to 55 minutes; a fork should slide into the flesh with no resistance.
- MolassesUnsulphured molasses is the closest modern equivalent to what the period sold as New Orleans molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and will dominate the squash. Brush it on thinly — it scorches at the cut edges before the flesh is done.
- Cover, then uncoverTent the pan with foil for the first two-thirds of the baking, then uncover to let the surface glaze and dry a little.
- Butter at the endThe butter goes on after baking, not before, so it stays as a distinct pool rather than cooking into the molasses. A tablespoon per serving is about right.
- Serving in the shellEach wedge goes to the table with the rind attached and is eaten out of it with a spoon or fork. Score the flesh in a crosshatch before baking if you want the seasoning to reach further in.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its chocolate chapters it carries a full complement of ordinary household cooking — hence a two-line squash recipe sitting in the vegetable section. Baked winter squash was staple New England fare, and pairing it with molasses reflects how cheap and ubiquitous molasses still was in Boston kitchens at the time; the city had been a molasses port since the colonial rum trade, and it remained the everyday sweetener for beans, brown bread, gingerbread and vegetables long after refined sugar had become affordable. The instruction to serve in the shell is characteristic of the period's plainer cookery, where the rind did the work of a dish.