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Cymlings or Summer Squash
These are better when young and tender, which may be known by pressing the nail through the skin; do not peel or take out seeds, but boil whole, or cut across in thick slices; boil in as little water as possible for one-half or three-quarters of an hour, drain well, mash and set on back part of stove or range to dry out for ten or fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally; then season with butter, pepper, salt and a little cream. If old, peel, cut up, take out seeds, boil and season as above.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment of pattypan and other summer squash, boiled soft and then dried out on the cool end of a wood range. The technique still works, but the timings belong to a different squash and a different stove.
- What a cymling isCymling (also cymbling or simlin) is the Southern name for the flat, scallop-edged pattypan squash. Any tender summer squash — yellow crookneck, zucchini, pattypan — behaves the same way here.
- Cut the boiling time hardHalf to three-quarters of an hour turns modern summer squash to water. Sliced, it is tender in 8 to 12 minutes; whole pattypans of a few inches across, 15 to 20. The nail test in the first line is the real guide to youth, and young squash cooks fast.
- The hinge is the dryingSummer squash is over 90 percent water, and boiling adds more. The ten or fifteen minutes on the back of the range is what makes this dish rather than a puddle. Do it in a wide pan over low heat, stirring, until the mash stops weeping.
- Less water still, or none"As little water as possible" was the best available advice on a range. Steaming in a covered pan with an inch of water, or simply salting and sweating the sliced squash in butter, gets you to the same mash with far less to drive off.
- Back part of the stoveOn a wood range this was the cool zone. On a modern hob it is the lowest gas setting or a burner turned off with residual heat, not a simmer.
- SeasoningButter, pepper, salt and a little cream is the whole of it: figure 2 tablespoons butter and 2 to 3 tablespoons cream per pound of cooked squash, added after the drying, not before, or the cream will just boil away.
- YieldTwo pounds of squash gives about four modest side servings once mashed and reduced.
Cymling is one of the older American vegetable words, generally traced to English "simnel" applied to the flat, round, scalloped squash that colonists found already under cultivation among Native growers along the Atlantic seaboard — the scallop squash is one of the oldest domesticated Cucurbita pepo forms in North America. By the time The Dixie Cook Book appeared in the 1880s, cymlings were ordinary summer garden produce across the South, picked young from a plant that produces relentlessly, and one way of dealing with a glut was to boil it and mash it with butter and cream. The instruction to dry the mash on the back of the range is a small portrait of the wood-fired kitchen, where a cook had a whole gradient of heat available on one surface.