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Squash (Cut the squash into pieces)
Cut the squash into pieces; remove seeds and pare. Cut into small pieces and add water almost to cover. Boil ten minutes and place in cooker two hours. Drain, mash and season with butter, salt and pepper. If the butter is browned slightly it will improve the flavor.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the food is brought to a hard boil on the range, then sealed into an insulated box to finish on stored heat. Everything here works on a stovetop as well, in a fraction of the time.
- What the "cooker" isA fireless cooker was an insulated wooden or metal chest, packed with hay, felt or asbestos, into which a boiling pot was clamped and left, sometimes along with a soapstone or iron disc heated separately on the range. A modern thermal cooker or a heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels does the same job; a slow cooker on low is the closest common substitute.
- The ten-minute boil is the hingeWith no heat source in the box, the pot must go in genuinely boiling and full. A half-filled pot, or one that has stopped bubbling, will drop below cooking temperature and the squash will simply sit in warm water for two hours.
- Which squashThis means winter squash — Hubbard, buttercup, butternut — the sort with a hard rind that has to be pared and seeded. Summer squash needs no such treatment and will collapse.
- On the range insteadCut into 1-inch pieces and simmered in water almost to cover, winter squash is tender in 15 to 20 minutes. The two hours in the box is a consequence of falling temperature, not a requirement of the vegetable.
- Drain thoroughlyBoiled squash carries a great deal of water and mashes to a soup if it is not drained well. Return the drained pieces to the dry hot pan for a minute to steam off surface moisture before mashing.
- The browned butterThe closing note is the best thing in the recipe. Cook the butter until it just begins to turn nut-brown and smell toasted, as the recipe's "browned slightly" suggests, then pour it over the mash; it adds a depth that plain boiled squash lacks.
- YieldA 2-lb piece of winter squash yields roughly 3 cups mashed, enough for four as a side dish.
Fireless cookery had a serious vogue in American households between about 1900 and the First World War, and cookbooks of the period often gave it a section of its own. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range had to be stoked and watched, and a summer kitchen with a fire going all afternoon was miserable, so bringing a pot to a boil for ten minutes and then shutting it into a hay-packed box saved both fuel and attention. Commercial cookers were sold by mail order, and homemade ones — a nail keg, a packing crate, newspaper or hay for insulation — were a staple of household-economy writing and of early home-extension teaching. Dense winter vegetables like squash were ideal candidates, since they tolerate long, gentle, unattended cooking; the technique survives in the Japanese and Scandinavian thermal cookers still sold today.