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Salsify
Scrape and wash the roots, cut them in slices, and stew in water enough to cover them; keep them well covered, as they will turn dark if exposed to the air; twenty minutes is sufficient to cook them; when done add butter, pepper, salt, and thicken with a little flour. Serve hot in a covered dish.
A plain stewed-vegetable treatment that depends almost entirely on keeping the cut roots away from air. The method is sound; only the timing and the thickening need a modern eye.
- Buying salsifyLook for firm, unwrinkled roots about the thickness of a finger, sold as salsify or oyster plant; black salsify (scorzonera) behaves the same way but has thicker skin. Two pounds of untrimmed roots yields roughly enough for four as a side dish.
- The hinge: acidulated waterSalsify discolours quickly once scraped. Drop the peeled slices straight into a bowl of water with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per quart, and cook them in acidulated water too. The original relies on a tight lid alone, which is not enough once the roots are cut.
- Twenty minutes is a maximumSliced thinly, salsify is tender in 10 to 15 minutes; whole roots want closer to 25. Test with a knife tip and stop the moment there is no resistance, as overcooked salsify turns woolly.
- The milky sapRaw salsify exudes a sticky latex that will coat your hands and the knife. Peel under running water or wear gloves, and wipe the blade with a lemon wedge.
- Thickening with flourStirring dry flour into the pan at the end gives a raw, pasty taste. Either drain the roots and finish them in a small white sauce made separately from equal butter and flour, or mash a teaspoon of butter with a teaspoon of flour and whisk that in, then simmer two minutes.
- ServingThe covered dish in the original is about heat retention, not appearance. Salsify cools fast; warm the serving dish and add a squeeze of lemon and chopped parsley, which suits the faintly sweet, artichoke-like flavour.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) was a standard American kitchen-garden root through the nineteenth century, and was commonly called oyster plant on the strength of a supposed resemblance in flavour when stewed in milk or butter — a comparison repeated in cookbooks far more often than it is convincing at the table. Its presence here, in a general-purpose household book, reflects a vegetable chapter built around what a family grew and cellared rather than what a grocer stocked: salsify keeps well in damp sand over winter and could be dug as needed. It fell out of common American use in the twentieth century, for reasons that are not altogether clear, and now turns up mainly at farmers' markets and in European cooking, where scorzonera in particular never went away.