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To Cook Salsify
Wash the roots, scrape well, cut in fine pieces. When boiled very tender, mash and season with pepper, salt, cracker crumbs, butter and milk. Pour into a dish and bake nicely.
A plain root-vegetable gratin from the era when salsify was a standard winter vegetable. The recipe assumes you know how to handle the root, which is where most of the trouble lies.
- Handle the cut root at onceScraped salsify browns within minutes and its sap is sticky enough to blacken your hands. Drop the pieces into water with a spoonful of lemon juice or vinegar as you work, and cook them in the same acidulated water.
- What to buyTrue salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is a slim tan root; black salsify or scorzonera is a different plant but is cooked the same way and is often easier to find. Parsnip is the usual substitute in texture, though it is markedly sweeter.
- "Boiled very tender"Fine pieces take 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer depending on thickness. The root should crush without resistance under a fork, since it is going to be mashed and will not soften further in the oven.
- Cracker crumbsThese mean plain soda or water crackers, crushed fine. They act as the binder here; roughly half a cup to a pound of cooked root should give a mash that holds its shape. Reserve a handful for the top if you want a crust.
- "Bake nicely"No oven heat is given. Something around 350 to 375F for 25 to 30 minutes, until the surface is set and lightly browned, suits it. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so this stage is only about heat and colour.
- Milk and butterNo quantities are given. Work in milk a spoonful at a time until the mash is soft but not loose it should mound on a spoon and allow roughly two tablespoons of butter per pound of root.
- YieldA pound of salsify, once scraped, feeds three or four as a side dish.
Salsify was a fixture of nineteenth-century American kitchen gardens and market stalls, valued because it stored well through winter and because its flavour was widely thought to resemble oyster — hence the common name "oyster plant," under which it also appears in cookbooks of this period. Recipes of the 1890s and 1900s routinely fried it in cakes, stewed it in milk as a mock oyster soup, or baked it as here, with cracker crumbs. It largely disappeared from American cooking over the twentieth century; the roots are thin, awkward to scrape, and stain the hands.