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Squash (Summer and winter squash)
Summer and winter squash are prepared and boiled in the same way. Wash and pare the squash; cut it into small pieces; cook in boiling water for half an hour; mash fine and season with salt, pepper and plenty of butter.
A bare-bones method from the era when vegetables were boiled first and considered later. It works, but the timing and the water are both worth rethinking.
- Summer and winter squash are not interchangeableSummer squash (yellow crookneck, pattypan, marrow) is 90 percent water and tender in 8 to 12 minutes; winter squash (Hubbard, butternut, acorn) is dense and needs the full half hour or longer. Treating them the same, as the recipe does, guarantees one of them is wrong.
- Half an hour on summer squashThirty minutes reduces zucchini or crookneck to grey water-logged pulp with no flavor left to season. Cook until a knife slides in with slight resistance, then drain immediately.
- Drain hard before mashingThis is the hinge. Boiled squash carries enormous water; if you mash it wet you get soup no amount of butter will fix. Drain in a colander, return to the dry hot pan, and stir over low heat a minute or two to steam off the excess.
- Paring winter squash"Pare" is easy on summer squash and miserable on a Hubbard. Halve winter squash, scoop the seeds, cut into wedges and cook skin-on; the flesh scrapes free of the shell with a spoon afterward.
- "Plenty of butter"Read that as 2 to 3 tablespoons per pound of cooked squash. The dish is essentially seasoned puree, so the butter is structural, not a garnish.
- Steaming or roasting insteadWinter squash gains from roasting at around 400F, which concentrates rather than dilutes the sugars. Boiling was the standard household treatment here; it is not what makes the vegetable taste best.
- YieldTwo pounds of squash, trimmed, gives about four modest side servings.
Squash is one of the few genuinely American vegetables in a book like this one: the word comes from a Narragansett term, usually given as askutasquash, shortened by English colonists. The summer and winter division is largely about storage rather than season of growth. Thin-skinned summer types had to be eaten within days, while hard-shelled winter squash kept in a cold cellar into spring, which may be why the two appear together in a single household entry despite behaving so differently in the pot. The loose-leaf format belongs to a period when cookery was increasingly taught as a system, and this terse boil-mash-butter formula is consistent with that.