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Steamed Summer Squash
Unless the squash is very tender, pare it thinly, cutting away little but the outer rind. Cut it in slices, and if the seeds are young and small do not remove them; if at all large, however, take them out, lay the squash on a plate, set it in a steamer over a kettle of boiling water and steam until tender, usually from thirty to forty minutes. Take it from the steamer, drain off any water that may be upon it, place it in a stewpan, and mash well. Add butter, salt and pepper to taste, and set the stewpan on the back of the range for fifteen minutes, uncovered, for the squash to dry as much as possible, stirring it once or twice meanwhile. Reheat, and serve. This kind of squash may also be boiled and served in the same way, but it is rather more wet when boiled than when steamed.
A plain mash of summer squash whose whole point is driving off water. Most of the instructions still hold; the timing does not.
- The hinge: drive off the waterSummer squash is over 90 percent water, and an undried mash is soup. The fifteen minutes uncovered over low heat is not optional padding — it is the step that turns steamed slices into something that holds its shape on the plate.
- "Back of the range"On a coal or wood range, the back was the coolest zone. Use the smallest burner on its lowest setting, or a 300F oven with the pan uncovered.
- Steaming timeThirty to forty minutes suggests squash considerably more mature and thick-fleshed than what is generally sold now. Supermarket yellow squash and zucchini in half-inch slices are usually tender in 10 to 15 minutes; longer just adds water you then have to cook off.
- Which squash"Summer squash" here means the soft-rind types — crookneck, straightneck, pattypan — picked young. Zucchini works and behaves the same way. Winter squash such as Hubbard or butternut is a different recipe entirely.
- ParingThe instruction to cut away "little but the outer rind" matters with mature squash, where the layer just under the skin is tough. Young supermarket squash needs no peeling at all.
- StewpanA stewpan is simply a saucepan with straight sides. Any heavy-bottomed pan will do; heavy is better for the drying stage, since a thin pan scorches the mash.
- Seasoning and yieldRoughly a tablespoon of butter per pound of squash is a reasonable starting point. Note that the recipe seasons before the drying period; salting afterwards instead will draw out less liquid. Two pounds of squash should give about four modest side servings.
Butterick's book appeared when American vegetable cookery was still organized around the range and the steamer rather than the skillet, and this entry shows the reasoning: steaming is recommended over boiling not for flavor or nutrition arguments but because the finished dish came out drier — the recipe says so outright. Summer squashes are cultivars of Cucurbita pepo, a species domesticated in the Americas, and the soft-rind types were grown in the Northeast before European settlement and picked immature. The recipe's pause over whether the seeds are worth removing suggests market squash of the period was sometimes further along than what is sold today. Mashing a watery vegetable with butter and drying it off appears in other nineteenth-century American recipes, including those for turnip and pumpkin. The instruction to finish it at the back of the range is a small piece of vanished kitchen geography: a wood or coal firebox gave a cook a continuous gradient of heat rather than the discrete settings of a gas burner.