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Carrots and Turnips in Cream Sauce
Scrub, scrape and cut carrots in small cubes. Wash, pare and cut purple-top turnips the same. (There should be one and onehalf cups of each.) Cover each (in separate vessels) with boiling water and cook until tender; add salt the last half hour of cooking. Drain well, toss together and reheat in one and one-half cups Thin White Sauce.
A plain vegetable side from a book of full Sunday menus, and one where the original timing reflects older, larger, tougher roots. Small cubes need far less time than the text implies.
- The cooking time"Add salt the last half hour" assumes the vegetables boil for at least thirty minutes. Half-inch cubes of modern carrot are usually tender in around 8-10 minutes, turnip a little longer. Salt the water at the start and test with a knife tip rather than watching the clock.
- Why separate potsThe instruction is worth keeping. Turnip is a brassica and can lend a faintly sulphurous, bitter note to its cooking water, and the two roots do not soften at the same rate. Cook them apart, drain both well, and combine only at the sauce stage.
- Purple-top turnipsThe standard purple-top white globe, still sold as plain turnip. Not rutabaga or swede, which is yellow-fleshed, sweeter and denser, and needs several minutes longer. Choose turnips no larger than a tennis ball; big ones go woody and sharp.
- Thin White SauceA standard thin white sauce of this period runs roughly 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour per cup of milk, with salt and a little white pepper; check the book's own cross-referenced recipe. For the 1 1/2 cups called for, that is 1 1/2 tablespoons each. Anything thicker turns the dish pasty.
- DrainingDrain the vegetables thoroughly and let them steam dry in the hot pan for a moment. Water clinging to the cubes will thin an already thin sauce into milk.
- ReheatingWarm through over low heat, folding rather than stirring hard, or the turnip cubes break down into the sauce. Two or three minutes is enough.
- YieldThree cups of vegetables in sauce serves four as a side dish. A grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of chopped parsley at the end is period-appropriate and improves it.
Carrots and turnips in a milk sauce belong to the long Anglo-American tradition of "creamed" vegetables, a category that filled out the middle of the dinner table before year-round produce made variety cheap. Both roots keep for months in a cool cellar, which made them dependable standbys in a northern household. Elizabeth O. Hiller's 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was built around complete weekly menus with cross-references to basic preparations, which is why the recipe simply names Thin White Sauce and expects the cook to turn to that page. The white sauce itself, a butter-flour-milk béchamel scaled to three thicknesses, was a staple of American cookery-school teaching in the Fannie Farmer era, and appears here doing what it usually did: making cellar vegetables into something worth serving on a Sunday.