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Steamed Squash
Remove the top of a Hubbard squash and steam the rest until • tender. Discard the pulp; scoop out the remainder of the soft portion; mash it, seasoning well with salt, pepper and butter; reheat; return to the shell and score the dome-shaped surface with a knife. Place the squash on a plate with a doily beneath it and serve.
A vegetable dish that doubles as a serving vessel. The instructions assume a cook who has handled a whole Hubbard before, and skip the two things that give trouble: its size and its rind.
- "Discard the pulp"Here pulp means the stringy seed mass in the central cavity, not the flesh. Scrape it out with a spoon before or after steaming; the flesh clinging to the shell is what gets mashed.
- Size and fitA mature Hubbard runs 8 to 15 lb and will not go into an ordinary steamer whole. Choose a small one, or cut the squash in halves or large wedges, steam those, and reassemble the shell for serving. A large roasting pan with a rack and a tight lid works better than a stacked steamer basket.
- TimingWedges take 25 to 40 minutes over boiling water; a small whole squash can take an hour or more. It is done when a knife slides through the flesh at the thickest point with no resistance.
- Cutting the rindHubbard skin is genuinely hard. Use a heavy chef's knife or cleaver on a stable board. There is also a long-repeated bit of kitchen lore that a whole Hubbard can simply be dropped on a hard floor to break it open, though this is anecdote rather than recorded practice.
- SeasoningSeason generously — roughly 2 to 4 tablespoons of butter and a teaspoon of salt per 2 lb of cooked flesh. Steamed squash carries more water than baked, so mash it over low heat for a few minutes to drive some off before it goes back in the shell.
- Reheating in the shellA steamed shell is softer than a baked one and may not hold its shape well when hot, so it is safest to set it on the serving dish before filling. The recipe simply reheats the mash and returns it; if you want to set the scored surface, a few minutes in a hot oven or under a broiler will do it, but move the shell off any paper doily first.
- The doilyDoilies of paper or linen were common under dishes of this kind in table service of the period. It is presentation, not cookery, and can be skipped.
- YieldNot given. A small Hubbard of about 6 lb yields enough mashed flesh for eight to ten as a side dish.
The Hubbard is a New England squash, and its name is generally traced to Elizabeth Hubbard of Marblehead, Massachusetts, who herself passed seed to the household of the seedsman James J. H. Gregory in the mid-nineteenth century; Gregory named the variety for her and sold it widely from his Marblehead catalogue. Its thick, warty rind made it the great winter keeper of the American cellar, holding for months when other squashes had gone soft, which is why it appears so often in cookbooks of Mrs. Fryer's era as a cold-weather vegetable. Serving food back in its own shell — squash, potatoes, tomatoes, oranges — was a fashion of turn-of-the-century American table service, and the scored dome and the doily beneath belong to that same impulse to make a plain vegetable look composed.