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Boiled Summer Squash
Wash squash and cut in thick slices or quarters. Cook twenty minutes in boiling salted water, or until soft. Turn in a cheese-cloth placed over a colander, drain, and wring in cheese-cloth. Mash, and season with butter, salt, and pepper. Fried Summer Squash I Wash, and cut in one-half inch slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again, fry in hot fat, and drain.
Two treatments for summer squash from Fannie Farmer's kitchen: one boiled and mashed, one crumbed and fried. The wringing step in the first is the part that matters.
- What "summer squash" meantIn 1896 this generally meant the pale, scallop-edged pattypan or a crookneck, both picked young with soft skins. Zucchini works the same way here; no peeling is needed for any of them if the skin yields to a thumbnail.
- The hinge: wring it drySummer squash is roughly 95 percent water, and boiled squash that is merely drained turns into soup when mashed. Gather the cheesecloth into a bundle and twist hard over the sink until no more liquid comes; it will pull out a startling amount. Let the squash cool a minute or two first so you can grip it.
- Twenty minutes is longThat timing suits an older squash cut in thick quarters. Half-inch slices of young squash are soft in 6 to 8 minutes, and overcooking here only adds water you then have to wring out again. Cook until a fork goes through with no resistance and stop.
- An alternative to boilingSteaming, or salting the raw grated squash and squeezing it, gets you to the same mash with less water to fight.
- The breading order"Crumbs, egg, and crumbs again" is the standard three-stage coating with flour replaced by a first crumb layer. Beat the egg with a spoonful of water so it flows, and let the breaded slices sit 10 minutes before frying so the coating sets and does not slide off in the fat.
- Frying fat and temperature"Hot fat" here means deep fat, judged the way the book judges it, by browning a bread cube in about 40 seconds. A half inch of oil in a skillet does the job for slices; turn once and drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
- Salting the slicesSprinkling the raw slices with salt draws out surface moisture. Blot them dry before crumbing, or the coating will steam rather than crisp.
- YieldFigure about 1 1/2 lb of squash for four as a side dish; the mash reduces considerably once wrung.
Summer squash is one of the American vegetables that needed no introduction to a Boston cookbook audience — squashes were cultivated across the Northeast long before English settlement, and Marblehead and Boston seedsmen were selling scallop and crookneck varieties commercially through the nineteenth century. Fannie Farmer's treatment is characteristic of the school she ran: no flourish, a precise timing, and one unusual mechanical instruction (the cheesecloth wringing) that solves the vegetable's one real problem. The fried version reflects how much of the late-Victorian vegetable repertoire ran through the crumb-and-egg coating, a technique the book applies with equal enthusiasm to eggplant, tomatoes, parsnips and salsify. Both recipes assume the squash arrives young and small; the mature, hard-skinned winter squashes are handled in a separate entry entirely.