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Squash
Wash the squash, cut in pieces, remove seeds, and stringy portion and boil in salted water or put in a steamer, and cook thirty minutes or more over boiling water. Mash, and season with butter and salt and pepper.
A bare-bones method for mashed winter squash, written when squash was sold whole and cooks were expected to know the rest. A few things are worth pinning down.
- Which squash"Squash" in a book of this period, cooked and mashed, means a hard winter type — Hubbard, buttercup, butternut or a field pumpkin. Summer squash and zucchini hold too much water for this treatment and will collapse into a thin puree.
- Steam rather than boilThe recipe offers both, but boiling waterlogs the flesh and you will be draining and drying the mash afterwards. Steaming over boiling water gives a denser, sweeter result and is the option to take.
- Thirty minutes "or more"Timing depends entirely on the size of the pieces. Two-inch chunks steam in 20 to 30 minutes; halves take 45 or longer. Test with a knife tip: it should meet no resistance at the center.
- Peel before or afterHubbard and pumpkin rind is easier removed after cooking, when the flesh scoops away from the shell with a spoon. Butternut peels more easily raw with a vegetable peeler.
- Drying the mashAfter mashing, return the puree to the dry pan over low heat and stir for a few minutes to drive off steam. The recipe does not mention this, and it is worth doing if the squash has been boiled rather than steamed.
- SeasoningButter, salt and pepper is the whole of it here. A tablespoon of butter per pound of cooked flesh is about right; winter squash is sweet enough not to need more, though nutmeg or a little cream are frequently seen in other recipes of the type.
- YieldA 3 lb winter squash yields roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of mash, depending on the thickness of the rind, serving four as a side dish.
Squash is one of the American contributions to the European table — the word comes from the Narragansett askutasquash, recorded by colonists in New England in the seventeenth century, and the plants were long cultivated across the Americas before that. Winter squash keeps for months in a cool cellar without processing, costs little, and yields a filling, starchy dish — qualities that recommended it at a time when reformers, vegetarians and wartime food administrators alike were pressing households to eat less meat.