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Turnips in Cream Sauce
Wash, pare and cut purple-top turnips in one-fourth inch cubes. Cook in boiling salted water until tender (from forty minutes to one hour). Drain well and reheat in White Sauce using cream in place of milk in sauce. (For Cream Sauce see Page 151.)
A plain vegetable side from the September menus, and the only thing standing between it and a good dish is the cooking time.
- The timing is the hingeQuarter-inch cubes of turnip are tender in roughly 8 to 12 minutes of boiling, far short of the forty minutes to an hour given here. Held that long, small cubes collapse into watery mush. Test with a knife tip at eight minutes.
- Purple-top turnipsStill sold under that name, sometimes as purple-top white globe. Choose roots no larger than a tennis ball; big ones turn woody and sharply bitter. This is a true turnip, not a rutabaga or swede, which is denser, yellower and needs longer.
- Drain well means dryReturn the drained cubes to the hot empty pan for a minute over low heat to drive off surface water. Turnips hold a great deal of it, and any that remains will thin the cream sauce to soup.
- The white sauceA white or cream sauce of the period typically ran to about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup liquid, cooked until it thickens; the book sends you to its own recipe on page 151. Substituting cream for milk as directed gives a heavier sauce, and either heavy or light cream works, with light cream likely the closer match to what was then simply sold as cream.
- Reheat, do not boilFold the turnips into the finished sauce and warm them through over low heat. Boiling a cream-enriched sauce with the vegetable in it risks breaking the sauce and further softening the cubes.
- SeasoningThe recipe assumes salt in the cooking water and nothing else. White pepper and a scrape of nutmeg suit it, and a spoonful of chopped parsley added at the end keeps it from looking entirely pale.
- YieldThe recipe names no quantities. As a working estimate, about 2 pounds of turnips, roughly three medium roots, with a cup of sauce will serve six as a side dish alongside a roast.
52 Sunday Dinners was built around the calendar, and turnips land in September, which is generally taken to be when the first pulling of autumn roots reaches the market: small, sweet, still thin-skinned, before the big storage roots of midwinter. Creaming a boiled vegetable was a common American treatment through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and cookbooks of the period print one white sauce recipe and then refer back to it page after page, exactly as this book does. The turnip itself was old-fashioned even then, a field crop as much as a garden one and long associated with plain country cooking and with livestock feed. The purple-top white globe named here was among the standard American market varieties of the era and is still grown under the same name.