Home › Vegetables › Boiled Winter Squash
Boiled Winter Squash
Prepare as for Steamed Winter Squash. Cook in boiling salted water, drain, mash, and season. Unless squash is very dry, it is much better steamed than boiled.
Baked Winter Squash I Cut in pieces two inches square, remove seeds and stringy portion, place in a dripping-pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and allow for each square one-half teaspoon molasses and one-half teaspoon melted butter. Bake fifty minutes, or until soft, in a moderate oven, keeping covered the first half-hour of cooking. Serve in the shell.
Two methods in one entry, and Farmer tells you outright which she prefers. The note about dryness is the whole point: watery squash boiled in more water gives you a pale, loose mash.
- Boil only very dry squashMuch supermarket winter squash, butternut and acorn especially, carries enough moisture that boiling waterlogs it. Steam it over an inch of water, or roast it cut-side down, and you get flesh that mashes stiff enough to hold a fork mark.
- A moderate oven350F. Keeping it covered for the first half-hour, as directed, traps steam and softens the flesh before the surface dries and the molasses catches.
- Dripping-panA shallow roasting pan or a rimmed sheet pan. Cover with foil for the first thirty minutes rather than hunting for a lid.
- Squash of the periodIn a Boston kitchen of 1896 this almost certainly meant Hubbard — a large, hard, blue-grey squash with a thick shell that holds its shape in two-inch pieces and genuinely can be served in the shell. Butternut works but the skin is thin and the flesh softer; expect closer to 35–40 minutes.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate. A half-teaspoon per two-inch square is a light hand, meant to glaze rather than sweeten.
- Cutting the shellA heavy chef's knife or cleaver and a steady board. Hubbard-type squash is genuinely hard; halving it first with the tip of the knife, then quartering, is safer than trying to cut two-inch squares from a whole one.
- YieldA 3 lb squash gives roughly 2 lb of usable flesh and serves four to six as a side, whether baked in pieces or mashed.
Winter squash was a New England staple long before it was a cookbook entry — a native American crop that kept in a cold cellar from harvest until spring, which is precisely why it earned the name. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats it the way her readers would have known it: bought whole, hacked into pieces, and cooked in the shell so nothing was wasted on peeling. The half-teaspoon of molasses per square is a small marker of the period and the region; molasses was the everyday sweetener in Massachusetts kitchens, cheap and always on hand, and it turns up throughout the book in places where a later cook would reach for brown sugar or maple syrup. The brisk verdict — "much better steamed than boiled" — is characteristic of Farmer, who was willing to print a method and then tell you not to use it.