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Summer Squash

Summer squash is boiled, mashed, strained dry, and seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Summer Squash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the squash

  1. Boil, pare, and slice the summer squashes.

  2. Remove the seeds and cut the slices into squares.

Cook and mash

  1. Place them in a saucepan, cover with boiling water, and add 1 teaspoon of salt.

  2. Boil for 20 minutes, then drain carefully.

  3. Mash the squash and strain it through a cloth until dry.

Season and serve

  1. Return the squash to a saucepan, add 1 teaspoon of butter, ½ teaspoon of salt, and a dash of pepper.

  2. Stir until very hot and serve in a heated vegetable dish.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Summer squashes
Form the bulk of the dish, providing the soft, mashed body of the vegetable.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the mashed squash.

The step that matters

Straining the squash until dry. Summer squash holds a lot of water. Straining it thoroughly removes excess liquid, so the mash becomes thick rather than watery and the seasoning is not diluted.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More summer squash recipes

Mashed 18Boiled 8Fried 8Stuffed 4 See all 19 →

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