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Mashed Squash
Wash the squashes and cut them into small pieces without removing the skin and seeds. Place them in a saucepan of boiling water with a lump of salt and boil until soft, which will take in the neighborhood of half an hour. Then turn the squash into a cloth, mash it, and squeeze it until the moisture is extracted. Return the squash to the saucepan with one-half teacupful of cream for each pint, season it to taste with pepper and salt, and stir it over the fire until it is thoroughly hot. Then turn it onto a hot dish, and serve.
A plain vegetable side from Oscar's Waldorf book, written when squash meant whatever was in the market that week. Two details need translating: what kind of squash the instruction to leave skin and seeds implies, and why the squeezing step is the whole dish.
- Which squashCooking skin and seeds and all only works with soft summer squash — yellow crookneck, pattypan, or marrow. A winter squash like Hubbard or butternut has rind and seeds that will never break down, and if you want to use one, peel and seed it first.
- The hinge: squeeze it drySquash is mostly water, and boiled squash is wetter still. Wringing it in a cloth is what separates this from a watery purée. Work in batches, let it cool enough to handle, and twist hard — expect to lose a surprising amount of liquid.
- Cloth and sieveA double layer of cheesecloth or a clean linen towel does the job. If you have left the skin on a slightly older squash, pass the mash through a food mill or coarse sieve after squeezing rather than mashing in the cloth.
- A teacupfulPeriod usage varied, but a teacup is often taken as about six fluid ounces, which would make half a teacupful roughly three fluid ounces — six tablespoons — of cream per pint of cooked squash. Add it gradually — the drier you squeezed, the more it will take.
- A lump of saltUnmeasured, and meant for the boiling water rather than the dish. A teaspoon or so per quart is enough; the real seasoning happens at the end.
- TimingHalf an hour is generous for small pieces of summer squash, which are usually tender in ten to fifteen minutes. Cook until a piece collapses under a fork and no longer.
- ReheatingStirring over the fire after the cream goes in is not just warming — it drives off more moisture and tightens the purée. Keep the heat moderate and stir steadily so the cream does not catch.
- YieldTwo pounds of summer squash gives roughly a pint of squeezed mash, which serves three or four as a side.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who gave his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), assembled a volume that swings between elaborate hotel cookery and unfussy American home dishes, and this is squarely the second kind. Squash is one of the genuinely native American vegetables — the name comes from a Narragansett word, generally given as askutasquash, and the summer varieties were long grown in kitchen gardens across the Northeast. The squeeze-in-a-cloth technique is a nineteenth-century habit for watery vegetables, and it reflects a period taste for vegetable purées that held their shape on the plate rather than spreading. Cream and pepper is the whole of the seasoning here, which tells you something about how restrained the vegetable course was expected to be beside the roasts it accompanied.