A Crookneck, or Winter Squash Pudding

History

Amelia Simmons's pudding begins with a good squash — cored, boiled, skinned and bruised smooth, then folded together with six stewed apples, fine bread crumbs, milk or cream, rose-water, wine, beaten eggs, nutmeg, sugar and a spoon of flour, beaten smartly together and baked. She names it two ways at once, "A Crookneck, or Winter Squash Pudding," and closes by offering the same receipt for pompkins, potatoes or yams with a little more moistening — one autumn-harvest formula stretched across the keeping crops of a New England larder.

The squash at its center is a wholly American plant. Cucurbita, the genus of squashes and pumpkins, is native to the Andes and Mesoamerica, and its domestication reaches back at least eight thousand years, older than many other domesticated crops. The very word carries that origin: "squash" comes from askutasquash, a Narragansett word for a green thing eaten raw. Native peoples grew and ate squash long before European arrival and taught its cultivation to the colonists. A "winter squash" is simply one of the tough-skinned, long-keeping sorts that hold through the cold months — which is why a single receipt could reach for it, or a pumpkin, or a stored root, from the same shelf.

"Crookneck" names the curve of the fruit's stem end. Today the yellow crookneck is usually a summer squash of the species Cucurbita pepo, but the crookneck a Hartford cook of the 1790s would have stored for a pudding was more likely the winter kind — the bottle-shaped, curve-necked Canada Crookneck, a Cucurbita moschata winter squash common in New England gardens and prized for serving mashed and in pies. Simmons's title, refusing to choose between "crookneck" and "winter squash," fits that older, interchangeable usage; and the receipt sits a page from her more famous "Pompkin" baked in a crust, in the book often credited with first printing what is now called pumpkin pie.

What the record does not keep is the pudding itself. No source traces this apple-and-squash composition to a particular household or table, or tells us who set it down to eat or what it meant to them. Simmons hands over the method — bruise the squash, stew the apples, bind with bread and eggs, bake — without a story attached, and leaves the squash to speak for a whole shelf of autumn keeping crops it could stand in for.

Ingredients

• 1 good squash
• 6 large apples
• 6-7 spoonsful dry bread or biscuit
• 1/2 pint milk or cream
• 2 spoons rose-water
• 2 spoons wine
• 5-6 eggs
• nutmeg, salt and sugar
• 1 spoon flour

Instructions

1. Core, boil and skin a good squash and bruise it well.
2. Pare, core and stew tender 6 large apples and mix with the squash.
3. Add 6-7 spoonsful dry bread or biscuit ground fine, 1/2 pint milk or cream, 2 spoons rose-water, 2 spoons wine, 5-6 beaten and strained eggs, nutmeg, salt, sugar and 1 spoon flour.
4. Beat all smartly together and bake.
5. For pompkins, potatoes or yams, use the same receipt with more moistening; for potatoes and yams add a few currants or dry whortleberries.