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Winter Squash
Cut squash, remove seeds, and steam or boil until soft. Remove squash from shell. Add butter, salt and pepper. Reheat and serve.
A four-sentence method that assumes you know what a winter squash is and how long it takes. The variables the original leaves out are the cut, the drainage, and the mashing.
- Which squashIn 1907 New England this most likely means Hubbard or a related hard-shelled winter type, though the recipe names none. Butternut, kabocha or acorn all work; only the cooking time changes, roughly 20 to 30 minutes steamed for pieces of 2-3 inches.
- Cutting a hard shellA Hubbard resists a chef's knife. Halve it by driving a heavy cleaver through with a mallet, or bake it whole for 15 minutes to soften the rind before cutting.
- Steam rather than boilThe instruction offers both, but boiled squash absorbs water and turns to a loose purée. Steaming over an inch of water, or roasting cut side down at 400F, keeps the flesh dense enough to hold butter.
- Drain and dry itThis is the hinge. After scooping the flesh from the shell, return it to the dry pan over low heat and stir until the excess moisture steams off, then add the butter. Adding fat to wet squash gives a watery result no amount of seasoning fixes.
- ProportionsNone are given. About 1 tablespoon of butter per pound of cooked flesh is a reasonable working amount; season with salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg if wanted.
- TextureThe recipe says only to add butter, reheat and serve; it never specifies mashing. If you want it broken up, a fork or potato masher gives a rough mash rather than a smooth puree.
- YieldA 4 lb squash yields somewhere in the region of 4 to 5 cups of cooked flesh, enough for six or so as a side dish.
Winter squash is a New World crop, grown across the Americas long before European contact, and the hard-shelled Hubbard type became a fixture of New England kitchen gardens in the nineteenth century because it keeps for months in a cool cellar without processing. That storage life is why a plain squash recipe sits in a general cookbook: it was a vegetable available in February when little else was. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it padded out its chocolate and cocoa formulas with a full complement of everyday American cooking, which is how a recipe with no chocolate in it earned its page.