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Mashed Squash

A simple dish of boiled summer squash mashed with butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Mashed Squash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel, seed, and slice the fresh summer squashes.

  2. Soak the squash slices in cold water for 10 minutes.

Cook

  1. Boil water with a little salt and add the squash.

  2. Cook until tender, about 20 minutes for young squash.

Mash and serve

  1. Mash the squash in a colander to remove excess water.

  2. Transfer to a deep dish and season with pepper, salt, and butter.

  3. Serve hot.

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

Fresh summer squashes
Forms the bulk of the dish and, once cooked and mashed, gives it a soft, moist texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the mashed squash a smoother mouthfeel and a rounder flavor.

The step that matters

Mashing in a colander to remove excess water. Squash holds a lot of water. Draining it well after cooking keeps the mash thick instead of loose and watery, and lets the butter and seasoning cling to it.

“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.

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