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Pumpkin
Cut in small pieces after peeling. Put on stove with just enough water to keep from sticking to vessel, as it contains so much moisture. Cook until tender and drain if there should be too much liquid. Season with butter and salt. Some fry in butter as you would squash.
A bare-bones method for pumpkin treated as a plain vegetable rather than a pie filling. The single thing that governs success is moisture: pumpkin flesh is mostly water, and the whole point of the near-dry pot is to keep it from turning to soup.
- Choose the right pumpkinLarge field pumpkins, the kind grown for jack-o'-lanterns, are watery and bland. Use a sugar or pie pumpkin, or substitute kabocha, butternut or another dense winter squash for firmer, sweeter flesh.
- Peeling and cuttingHalve, scrape out seeds and fibre, then peel with a knife; the rind of most pumpkins is tough going for a vegetable peeler. Pieces of about an inch should cook evenly in roughly 15 to 20 minutes, but the recipe asks only that you cook until tender.
- "Just enough water"A quarter inch in the bottom of a heavy saucepan is plenty; a lid will help the pumpkin steam in its own juice, though the recipe does not specify one. More water than that leaches out flavour and leaves you draining away the best of the dish.
- Dry it after drainingIf you do drain, return the pan to low heat uncovered for a minute or two and let the surface moisture steam off before adding butter. Otherwise the butter will not coat and the seasoning tastes thin.
- The frying variantThe closing line reads as an alternative to boiling rather than a step after it, though the text does not say outright. Cut slices roughly half an inch thick and fry in butter until browned on both sides, and do not crowd the pan or they will stew instead of colour.
- SeasoningButter and salt are the whole of it as written; black pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, or a spoonful of brown sugar all sit well with pumpkin and are in keeping with the period.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, a small pumpkin of about 3 lb whole will feed about four once peeled and seeded.
Mrs. Wilson's cook book dates from around 1920, following the years in which she wrote newspaper food columns aimed at stretching household supplies, and the entry shows it: no measurements, no fuss, just a technique that can be applied to whatever size pumpkin the garden or market yielded. Pumpkins and other squashes are native to the Americas and were a field crop long before they became a dessert ingredient; pumpkin was also eaten plainly as a boiled or fried vegetable, seasoned like turnip or squash, alongside its use in pies. The closing note that "some fry in butter as you would squash" is characteristic of the book's manner, allowing for more than one method.