Peel small tender turnips; heat 1 tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan. Place the turnips in whole, sprinkle with salt and pepper; add a tablespoonful of sugar. Pour over a cup of water; cover and let cook for one hour until tender but not broken. Thicken the sauce with flour and milk. Add a little water and set in the oven a half hour, covered with paper; then serve.
A simple braise with one problem: the timings belong to a coal range and to turnips much larger and coarser than what the recipe asks for. Taste early.
- The hinge: cooking timeSmall tender turnips are done in 20 to 30 minutes of covered simmering, not an hour. The instruction "tender but not broken" is the real direction; the hour is an estimate for tough winter roots. Test with a skewer at 20 minutes.
- Which turnipThe title says Swedish, and a "Swedish turnip" is the rutabaga or swede, but the recipe specifies small tender turnips, which points to young white globe turnips. Either works; swede is denser and yellower and will want the longer end of the timing.
- QuantitiesNo number of turnips is given. A tablespoon of butter, a tablespoon of sugar and a cup of water suits about 1 1/2 lb of small turnips, roughly four servings as a side dish.
- Thickening the sauceNo amounts are given here either. Whisk about a tablespoon of flour into half a cup of milk until smooth, stir it into the simmering liquid, and let it cook two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Oven heatThe book names no temperature. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for this stage, and its purpose is to hold and mellow the dish rather than to cook it further; twenty minutes is ample once the turnips are already tender.
- The paper coverThe recipe says only 'covered with paper'; likely a sheet laid over the dish, and it can be read as what a modern kitchen calls a cartouche, a round of buttered parchment on the surface. Either way it slows evaporation less than a tight lid and helps keep the milk-thickened sauce from forming a skin.
- ServingGood with pork, ham or boiled beef. The sugar is not optional in spirit: it is what turns a peppery root into a Scandinavian-tasting side.
Turnips and swedes were the backbone of northern European winter cooking long before the potato displaced them, and Sweden's association with the swede is old enough to be built into the English name; the vegetable was known in Britain as the Swedish turnip from the late eighteenth century, when it arrived as a field and fodder crop and worked its way onto the table. The butter-and-sugar treatment here is characteristic of Scandinavian handling of root vegetables, where a little sweetness is used to balance the mustard-family sharpness rather than to make a dessert of them. Its appearance in a book of a dish a day from every nation says as much about the period's appetite for culinary tourism as about Sweden, and for Sweden the turnip was an obvious, almost punning, choice.