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Diced Turnips or Carrots
Pare and dice enough turnips or carrots to make three cupfuls. Boil them in salted water and drain them. Brown a few grains of sugar in a sauce-pan or frying-pan, add two tablespoonfuls of Snowdrift and a few grains of salt. When the Snowdrift has melted, stir in the vegetable. Cover and let stand in a warm place for at least fifteen minutes, then dust lightly with parsley and serve.
A simple glazed vegetable side, written to sell shortening. The method is sound; only the fat and the vague quantities need translating.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold in America from the early twentieth century, associated with the Southern Cotton Oil Company and later the Wesson Oil & Snowdrift Company. Use 2 tablespoons of butter instead — it browns with the sugar and tastes of something, which shortening does not.
- "A few grains"Period shorthand for a pinch. Read it as about 1/4 teaspoon of sugar and a scant 1/4 teaspoon of salt. The sugar is there for color and a faint caramel note, not sweetness.
- Browning the sugarThis is the hinge. A pinch of dry sugar in a pan goes from amber to acrid in seconds, and over high heat it will scorch before it melts evenly. Keep the heat at medium, watch for the first color, then add the fat immediately to stop it.
- Boiling the vegetablesDiced turnip needs 8-10 minutes in salted water, carrot 6-8. Stop while they still have some resistance; they will sit covered afterward and continue to soften.
- The fifteen-minute standNot idleness — it lets the glaze cling and the dice finish cooking in residual heat. A covered pan off the burner, or a very low oven, does the job. The recipe sets a minimum, not a maximum, but a long hold will soften turnips further.
- ParsleyFresh, chopped fine. Roughly a tablespoon for this quantity, added off the heat so it stays green.
- YieldThree cups of diced raw vegetable serves four as a side dish.
Cookbooks issued by fat and flour manufacturers were a major channel for recipe distribution in the early twentieth century, and Snowdrift — a cottonseed shortening — was one of them. Cottonseed oil began as a byproduct of the Southern cotton industry and became valuable once refiners learned to deodorize and harden it, which is why so many American branded shortenings of the period trace back to cotton rather than dairy. The dish itself is an older European technique: root vegetables finished in fat with a little caramelized sugar, close to what French kitchens call glacer. What the book does is substitute its product for the butter that the method assumed, a swap repeated throughout these promotional volumes.