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Baked Squash
Wash a Hubbard squash and cut it into large pieces, removing the pulp. Place these, outer side down, in a shallow baking dish and bake until brown. Baked squash is eaten like baked sweet potatoes with butter and salt.
Four lines of instruction with no temperature and no time, which is typical of vegetable entries in books of this era. The details below fill in what the original assumes you already know.
- Oven temperatureNo setting is given. A hot-but-not-fierce oven, around 400F, browns the cut surfaces without drying the flesh; at 350F you will get tender squash but little colour.
- "Removing the pulp"This means the seed cavity — the loose seeds and the stringy fibre around them — not the firm orange flesh. Scrape it out with a sturdy spoon; the flesh is what you are eating.
- Cutting a HubbardThe shell is genuinely hard and often warty. Use a heavy chef's knife or cleaver and a mallet, or drop the whole squash on a hard floor to break it up. Do not try to force a thin blade through the ridges.
- "Outer side down"Skin against the dish, cut flesh facing up. This keeps the cut faces exposed to the oven's heat so they can take colour, which is what the recipe asks for; flesh-side down, the cut surfaces sit against the dish in their own liquid and will not brown.
- TimingExpect 45 to 60 minutes for pieces about 3 inches across, longer for a thick-walled winter squash. It is done when a knife goes into the flesh with no resistance and the edges have taken colour.
- Fat and moistureThe recipe adds nothing before baking, which is why browning works. A brush of oil or melted butter on the cut faces helps the colour; a covering of foil defeats the purpose.
- SubstitutionsTrue Hubbard squash is a seasonal farm-stand item in much of the country. Blue Hubbard, kabocha, buttercup or a large butternut all bake the same way; avoid the watery summer squashes.
- YieldA Hubbard commonly runs somewhere around 8 to 12 lb and will serve a dozen or more as a side dish. The flesh reheats well and can be scooped out and mashed the next day.
Hubbard is a named variety of Cucurbita maxima, the big winter squash group, and it was a standard American keeping squash from the mid-nineteenth century well into the twentieth — thick-shelled, unglamorous, and able to sit in a cool cellar until spring. The name is generally traced to a Mrs. Elizabeth Hubbard of Marblehead, Massachusetts, who passed the seed to the Marblehead seedsman James J. H. Gregory; he catalogued it under her name, and the story is repeated in seed catalogues of the period rather than documented elsewhere. The absence of any temperature or time tells you how routine the vegetable was: the writer assumes a cook who knows her own range and simply needs reminding that squash, like sweet potato, is served with butter and salt and nothing else.