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Summer Squash
Wash and cut in quarters. Cook in boiling salted water until tender. Drain in cheese cloth. Add butter, salt and pepper. Reheat and serve.
Four lines of instruction for what is essentially a mashed squash. The whole dish turns on how thoroughly you get the water out.
- The hinge: drain hardSummer squash is roughly 95 percent water, and boiling adds more. Turning the cooked quarters into a square of cheesecloth and twisting until no more liquid runs out is what separates this from a bowl of pale soup. A clean kitchen towel or a fine sieve pressed with the back of a spoon does the same job.
- What "summer squash" meantIn a 1907 New England book this would most likely be yellow crookneck or white pattypan, picked young with soft skin and undeveloped seeds. Zucchini was not yet common in American markets but works identically. Choose squash under about 8 inches; larger ones are watery and seedy and will not repay the effort.
- Quartering and peelingYoung squash needs no peeling and no seeding. Quarter lengthwise, then cut into 2-inch lengths so the pieces cook evenly and fit the cloth.
- Cooking timeThe original gives none. Boiling salted water will bring quartered summer squash to tender in 8 to 12 minutes. Test with a knife tip; it should meet little resistance.
- The finished texturePressing the cooked squash in cheesecloth will break the pieces up, so expect something closer to a rough mash than neat quarters. After draining, the squash is stirred with butter and seasoning over heat until any remaining moisture has steamed off.
- Butter, in period proportionNo quantity is given. For 2 lb of squash, 2 to 3 tablespoons is a reasonable amount. Nutmeg or a spoonful of cream were sometimes added to squash in this period if you want them.
- YieldTwo pounds of raw squash cooks down considerably and serves four as a side.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and published in 1907 -- a general household cookbook issued to put a candy maker's name in American kitchens, which is why chocolate recipes sit alongside plain vegetable cookery like this. Summer squash is Cucurbita pepo, domesticated in the Americas long before European contact and adopted early by New England households; the name comes from the Narragansett askutasquash, generally translated as something eaten green or uncooked. Boiling and then wringing the squash dry in cheesecloth was a common nineteenth-century American treatment, and it reflects a kitchen that boiled nearly every vegetable first and worried about the consequences after.