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Diced Turnips
Pare, slice, cut in dice an inch square, boil till nearly done, in as little water as possible; to one quart of turnips, add one table-spoon sugar, salt to make it palatable; when they are boiled as dry as possible, add two or three spoons of cream and a beaten egg, and serve. Excellent.
A plain nineteenth-century vegetable dish that depends entirely on getting the turnips dry before the enrichment goes in. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: cook them dryBoil in barely enough water to keep the pan from scorching, then drive off whatever liquid remains before the cream and egg go in. Wet turnips will thin the binding into a grey puddle rather than glazing the dice.
- A quart of turnipsMeasured as prepared dice, a quart is somewhere around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of trimmed turnip, or two to three medium roots. That should serve about four as a side dish, though the recipe gives no yield.
- "Dice an inch square"An inch is large by modern habit and it is deliberate: the pieces hold their shape through the boiling and the final stirring. Cut them smaller and you get mash.
- Which turnipThe recipe says only 'turnips', which in this period most often meant the white-and-purple table turnip rather than rutabaga (swede). Rutabaga works but is sweeter and denser, so it needs more cooking time and less of the added sugar.
- "Boil till nearly done"Ten to fifteen minutes for inch dice, until a knife tip meets slight resistance. They finish cooking during the drying and the final stir, so pulling them early is the point.
- The sugar and saltOne tablespoon of sugar per quart reads high to modern taste; it may be offsetting the mustard-oil sharpness that older storage turnips can develop. With sweet young ones, start with a teaspoon and taste.
- Adding the eggTwo or three spoons of cream and one beaten egg for a quart of turnips is a light binding, not a custard. Take the pan off direct heat, stir the egg in quickly so it thickens on the residual heat, then return it to low heat for a minute or two, stirring, until it coats rather than scrambles.
Buckeye Cookery (first published at Marysville, Ohio, in 1876) was compiled from contributions by a network of Midwestern housekeepers, and its vegetable chapter reflects a cellar-based diet: turnips, cabbage, parsnips and winter squash kept for months in a root cellar and appeared on the table long after the garden was finished. Turnips were cheap and abundant and had a reputation for coarseness, and dishes like this one dress them up with sugar to blunt any bitterness and a cream-and-egg finish of the same sort used to bind creamed onions and cauliflower.