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Salsify, or Vegetable Oysters
Wash and scrape thoroughly, and throw into a pan of cold water. Cut into pieces half an inch long, boil until tender, then pour off the water, season with pepper and salt, a lump of butter, and enough cream to almost cover them; thicken gravy with very little flour. This dish is nice served on toast. (
A simple creamed vegetable that depends almost entirely on handling the root properly before it ever reaches the pan.
- Acidulate the waterScraped salsify browns within minutes, which is why the original says to throw it straight into cold water. Add a spoonful of lemon juice or vinegar to that water and to the cooking water to keep the pieces pale.
- What salsify isThe long, thin, sand-coloured root sold as salsify or oyster plant; black salsify (scorzonera) works the same way but needs peeling rather than scraping, ideally with gloves, as the sap stains. Neither contains oysters, despite the name.
- Boiling timeHalf-inch pieces take roughly 15 to 25 minutes in salted water depending on the thickness of the root. Test with a knife tip rather than a clock; overcooked salsify collapses into fibres.
- "Enough cream to almost cover"For about a pound of prepared root, that is roughly 3/4 to 1 cup. Heavy or whipping cream is the safer choice; lower-fat creams and half-and-half are more prone to curdling when simmered.
- Thickening"Very little flour" means about a teaspoon for that quantity. Slake it in a spoonful of cold cream before stirring it in, or the sauce will be lumpy, and simmer a couple of minutes to cook out the raw taste.
- The toastUse a firm white bread, toasted dry and buttered, and serve the moment the sauce goes on. Salsify in cream sets a soggy slice very quickly.
- YieldA pound of untrimmed roots feeds two to three as a side dish. Buy more than looks necessary; scraping and trimming loses an appreciable share of the weight.
Salsify is traditionally said to have earned the name "vegetable oyster" from a flavour that cooks were willing to compare to the real thing, and American cookbooks leaned on the comparison, often frying the boiled root in patties as mock oysters. The plant, Tragopogon porrifolius, is a Mediterranean native long grown in European kitchen gardens and carried to North America by early settlers; it kept well in the ground or in a cellar of damp sand, which made it useful at the late-winter table when fresh green vegetables had run out. Its appearance here among the ordinary vegetables of a household book, treated plainly in cream on toast, suggests it was still a familiar item; it became much less common in general American cooking later in the twentieth century.