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Stewed Squash
Peel a squash, cut it into small pieces and boil it in salted water until tender. Drain, put it into a clean towel and wring out all the water; put it again into a saucepan over the fire with two heaping tablespoonfuls of butter and a seasoning of salt and pepper, stir until it is hot, and then serve.
A plain treatment that lives or dies on one step: getting the water out. Squash boiled and buttered without wringing turns to soup on the plate.
- The hinge is the towelTwisting the cooked squash in a cloth is what makes this dish work, and it suits soft-fleshed summer squash best. Use a flour-sack towel or several layers of cheesecloth, let the squash cool for a minute so you can grip it, and squeeze hard over the sink.
- Which squashThe method points to summer squash — yellow crookneck, pattypan or what a 1900 market might have called cymling — though the recipe says only 'a squash.' Zucchini works. Winter squash such as butternut or Hubbard will not release water the same way and turns to paste under wringing.
- PeelingWorth doing for older, thick-skinned squash. Young summer squash needs no peeling at all, and skipping it keeps the pieces from collapsing.
- Cooking timeSmall pieces of summer squash are tender in 5 to 8 minutes of boiling — well short of the long cooking a period cook might assume. Overboiled squash disintegrates in the towel.
- Butter quantityTwo heaping tablespoons comes to something like three level tablespoons. The recipe gives no weight of squash — it says only 'a squash' — so scale to what you have. Cut the butter back if you like, but it is standing in for all the liquid you just wrung out.
- FinishingStir over moderate heat only until hot through, a minute or two. Any longer and the drained pulp begins to fry and brown, which is a different dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; assuming around two pounds of squash, expect about four side servings once the water is gone. The volume loss is dramatic, so buy more than looks necessary.
Stewed squash of this kind is a plain American vegetable dish, and its presence in a Waldorf-Astoria book is a reminder that Oscar Tschirky's collection was as much a household reference as a record of hotel cookery — French garnishes and terrapin share the book with squash and boiled hominy. The technique of pressing cooked squash dry in a cloth is often said to belong to Southern and Middle Atlantic cooking, where the watery yellow crookneck and pattypan squashes of high summer needed some way to be served without flooding the plate; the same logic underlies squash casseroles and fritters. Summer squashes are New World cucurbits, cultivated in the Americas long before European contact, and by the late nineteenth century they were common enough in eastern markets to need no explanation in a cookbook — which is why Oscar simply writes "a squash" and moves on.