Skip to main content
Main

Baked Hubbard Squash

Baked Hubbard squash pieces seasoned with salt, pepper, molasses or brown sugar, and butter, then baked until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and butter 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 ↓

Baked Hubbard Squash

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Split the Hubbard squash and cut it into uniform pieces.

  2. Remove the seeds and stringy parts.

Season and bake

  1. Place the pieces in a dripping pan and sprinkle with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  2. Add ½ teaspoon of molasses or brown sugar and 1 teaspoon of butter to each piece.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until tender, covering for the first half hour.

Serve

  1. Serve in folded napkins in the shells.

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. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  2. Molasses + buttertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,123 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Pepper + molassestop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Hubbard squash
Provides the dense, sweet flesh that becomes tender and soft as it bakes.
Molasses or brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the squash surfaces brown and caramelize in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and keeping the squash moist as it cooks.

The step that matters

Covering for the first half hour. Covering traps steam so the squash cooks through and softens before the surface dries out and browns. Uncovered from the start, the exterior can dry or scorch before the flesh is tender.

“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.

You might also like

Molasses SauceMolasses Sauce32 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes