Home › Vegetables › Baked Winter Squash II
Baked Winter Squash II
Cut squash in halves, remove seeds and stringy portion, place in a dripping-pan, cover, and bake two hours, or until soft, in a slow oven. Remove from shell, mash, and seasor with butter, salt, and pepper,
A straightforward dry-roast of a hard winter squash, written for a coal range where a slow oven ran all day. The only real decisions are temperature, timing and how much moisture you let escape.
- Slow ovenRead this as a low oven, somewhere around 300F; period equivalents for "slow" range from about 250 to 325F. Two hours at that temperature suits a large Hubbard or blue squash; a butternut or acorn half will be soft in 45-60 minutes, so check with a knife tip rather than the clock.
- Dripping-panA shallow rectangular roasting pan. Any rimmed sheet pan or roasting tin works; line it, since the sugars that weep out will caramelize and stick.
- Covered, cut side downCovered -- the instruction to cover is what keeps the flesh from drying to fibre over two hours. Foil over the pan does the job. The recipe does not specify which way up the halves go, though laying them cut side down traps steam against the flesh.
- Which squash"winter squash" in a New England book of this date would likely have included Hubbard, the standard market squash, often sold in cut chunks because a whole one can run well over 10 lb. Kabocha, buttercup or butternut all behave the same way.
- Drain before mashingScrape the flesh out while hot and let it sit a minute in a colander or press it lightly in the pan. Baked squash carries a surprising amount of water, and mashing it in gives you a loose puree that butter cannot rescue.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives no quantities. Two to three tablespoons of butter per pound of cooked flesh is a reasonable modern starting point. Note that the recipe seasons after mashing, not before.
- YieldA 3 lb squash gives roughly 3 cups of mashed flesh, enough for four to six as a side dish.
Winter squash has been grown in New England since the colonists took it up from Native farmers; the word itself comes from a Narragansett term generally rendered askutasquash. Hubbard squash, the variety a Boston cook of the 1890s would have had in mind, was popularized by the Marblehead seedsman James J. H. Gregory and named for a neighbor who supplied him with seed -- a story Gregory told himself in his catalogues. Squash kept in a cool cellar from autumn into late winter without canning or root-cellar sand. The book gives two baked versions; this one is mashed and seasoned in the manner of potato.