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Baked Squash
Cut in pieces, scrape well, bake from one to one and a-half hours, according to the thickness of the squash; to be eaten with salt and butter as sweet potatoes.
A bare-bones nineteenth-century method that assumes a hard winter squash and a hot wood-fired oven. The gaps are the oven temperature, the seeds, and whether the skin goes on or comes off.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given because a range oven of the period was judged by hand and by habit. Bake at 375-400F; the hour to hour and a half in the original fits that range for thick-fleshed squash.
- "Scrape well"Most likely means removing the seeds and the stringy fibre from the seed cavity rather than peeling, in which case the rind is left on and the flesh spooned out or eaten from the shell. The original does not say either way.
- Which squashThe reference to thickness and the long baking time point to a dense winter squash such as Hubbard or winter crookneck rather than a summer squash, which would cook through far faster. Butternut, acorn, or kabocha can be treated the same way.
- Cut side downPlacing the pieces cut side down on a lightly oiled sheet steams the flesh and prevents the dry, leathery surface you get from baking them open. Turn them face up for the last ten minutes if you want a little browning.
- DonenessA knife or skewer should slide into the thickest part with no resistance and the shell should give under gentle pressure. Thin acorn halves may be done in 45 minutes; a heavy Hubbard wedge can want the full hour and a half.
- YieldReckon one small acorn half, or a wedge of about 8 oz, per person. Two or three pounds of raw squash serves four as a side.
- ServingThe comparison to sweet potatoes is the point: salt and butter only, no sugar or spice. The dish belongs beside roast meat rather than at the sweet end of the table.
Squash is one of the oldest cultivated foods of the Americas, and the hard winter types kept in a cool cellar from autumn well into spring, which is why they turn up so often in nineteenth-century American household books as a plain, cheap vegetable side. The word itself comes from a Narragansett term, generally given as askutasquash, shortened by English colonists. Baking in the shell was among the least troublesome ways to cook one: no peeling a rock-hard rind, no boiling it to water, and the oven was often already hot from the day's bread or roast. It appears in The Home Cook Book, a Chicago community cookbook compiled from contributed receipts, where instructions were written cook-to-cook.