Home › Vegetables › Salsify Or Vegetable Oysters (Parboil after scraping off)
Salsify or Vegetable Oysters (Parboil after scraping off)
Parboil after scraping off the outside, cut in slices, dip it into a beaten egg and fine bread-crumbs, and fry in lard. Or, slice crosswise five or six good-sized plants, cook till tender in water enough to cover, then add a pint or more of rich milk mixed with one table-spoon flour, season with butter, pepper and salt, let boil up and pour over slices of toasted bread; or add three pints milk, or half milk and water, season and serve with crackers like oyster soup.
Three treatments of salsify in one entry: breaded and fried, creamed over toast, and a milk soup meant to pass for oyster stew. All hinge on handling the root before it discolours.
- Acidulate as you scrapeSalsify oxidizes to a dull brown within minutes of peeling. Drop the scraped roots straight into water with a splash of lemon juice or vinegar, and add a little to the parboiling water as well.
- "Five or six good-sized plants"Reckon about 1 to 1 1/4 lb of trimmed root, which serves three or four. Modern salsify is sold in slender bunches, so you may need eight or ten roots to reach that weight.
- Parboiling timeSliced salsify is tender in 10 to 15 minutes of simmering; whole roots take 20 to 30. It should yield easily to a knife tip but not collapse, since the fried version needs slices firm enough to bread.
- Fry in lardLard is still the best choice for flavour here, but any fat holding 350 to 365F works. Drain the parboiled slices thoroughly and pat dry or the egg wash will slide off.
- The milk stageA tablespoon of flour in a pint of milk gives a very thin sauce by design. Whisk the flour into a little cold milk first, then add it to the pot, and let it come to a boil only briefly so the starch cooks out without the milk scorching.
- "Rich milk"In period usage this generally meant unskimmed milk, or milk with the cream left in. Whole milk with a few tablespoons of cream approximates it; skim milk will taste thin and watery in the soup version.
- The soup proportionThree pints of milk to a pound of root makes roughly four to six servings, closer to a thin stew than a chowder. Half milk and half the vegetable cooking water is arguably the better option, as it keeps more of the root's own flavour.
- ServingFor the creamed version, toast the bread hard and pour the salsify over it just before it reaches the table, or it will go to sop.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is often said to have earned the name vegetable oyster from a mild sweetness that nineteenth-century cooks found oyster-like, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented; either way, a root that could be crumbed and fried or stewed in milk had an obvious appeal on Midwestern tables. Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Marysville, Ohio, and the third variation here, seasoned and served with crackers "like oyster soup," is exactly the kind of substitution its readers needed. The plant is a Mediterranean native long grown in European kitchen gardens; American seed catalogues carried it steadily through the 1800s before it faded from commercial cultivation, which is why it now turns up mostly at farmers' markets and in seed lists rather than supermarkets.