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Baked Squash in the Shell

Baked squash in the shell is a simple dish of hubbard squash baked with salt, pepper, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 Squash in the Shell

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cut the hubbard squash into pieces about four inches square.

  2. Place the pieces in a baking pan.

  3. Sprinkle each piece with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  4. Put a lump of butter in the center of each piece.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until tender.

  2. Serve in the shell directly from the oven.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Hubbard squash
Forms the tender, sweet flesh that is cooked and served in its shell.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, moistening the squash as it melts into the flesh.

The step that matters

Bake until tender. Squash is done when the flesh is soft all the way through, which depends on oven heat and piece size. Pieces that are cut unevenly cook unevenly, so some stay firm while others turn mushy. Checking the thickest part with a fork helps ensure even tenderness.

“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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