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Mashed Turnips
Peel and dice 3 turnips, cover with boiling salted water and cook till tender; drain and press the water well out of them. Return to pan and add 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1 saltspoon white pepper, beat and mash them well together, when thoroughly hot turn into vegetable dish and serve.
Carrots, a la Poulette Boil 2 bunches of carrots until tender in boiling salted water, then drain. Blend 2 tablespoons Crisco with 1 tablespoon flour, when smooth add 1 cup milk and stir till boiling, add salt, pepper and paprika to taste, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley and cook for 5 minutes, then add carrots and allow to cook for 5 minutes longer. Serve hot.
Two plain vegetable dishes from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, written for cooks who knew what they were doing and needed only quantities. A few of those quantities need translating.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. In the carrot dish, "to taste" is the only guidance given, so season at the end once the sauce has reduced.
- Which turnips, and how manyThree turnips is vague by modern standards. Assume white or purple-top turnips of about 3 inches, roughly 1 1/2 lb trimmed, which yields four modest servings. Rutabaga (called swede in Britain) works but takes longer and mashes sweeter and yellower.
- CriscoThe book was published to sell it, and Crisco is still on shelves, though reformulated to remove trans fats. Butter is the obvious substitute in both dishes and will improve the flavour of the mash considerably.
- Pressing the water outThis is the hinge of the turnip recipe. Turnips hold a great deal of water and a wet mash will be soupy and bland. Drain well, then return the pieces to the dry hot pan over low heat for a minute or two to steam off surface moisture before mashing.
- Two bunches of carrotsA bunch was a tied handful rather than a fixed measure, so probably somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 lb in total. Cut them into even sticks or coins before boiling; whole carrots of varying thickness will not cook evenly.
- Don't overboil the carrotsTen to fifteen minutes for cut carrots is plenty, since they get another five minutes in the sauce. The original assumes an unhurried "until tender"; taken literally that produces carrots that collapse in the milk.
- About that sauceA classic sauce poulette is a velouté finished with egg yolk and lemon juice. What is given here is a plain white sauce with parsley and paprika, no yolk and no acid. A squeeze of lemon off the heat brings it nearer the name.
- YieldEach dish serves four as a side. Both reheat poorly; the mash stiffens and the white sauce breaks, so make them close to serving.
This page comes from A Calendar of Dinners, one of the Procter & Gamble cookbooks written by Marion Harris Neil to introduce American cooks to Crisco after its 1911 launch — which is why a plain turnip mash specifies three tablespoons of shortening where an earlier cookbook would have said butter or cream. The pairing of the two recipes here is typical of the format: the book laid out a year of complete menus, so vegetables appear in the order a housekeeper would need them rather than grouped by kind. Turnips were cheap winter keeping vegetables and appear constantly in period American menus; carrots dressed in a milk sauce and called à la poulette show the era's habit of borrowing a French name for a very domestic white sauce, something often attributed to the influence of French restaurant cookery on the American middle-class table.