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Salsify or Vegetable Oysters (Wash thoroughly scrape off)
Wash thoroughly, scrape off skin with a knife, cut across in rather thin slices, stew until tender in water enough to cover them, with a piece of salt codfish for seasoning. Before sending to table, remove codfish, thicken with flour and butter rubbed together, toast slices of bread, put in dish, and then add the vegetable oyster. This method gives the flavor of oysters to the vegetable, and adds much to its delicacy. Or, after stewing until tender in clear water, mash, season with pepper and salt, and serve. - Mrs. Gov. J. J. Bagley, Michigan.
A simple stewed root dish whose whole point is the codfish, which is used as a seasoning agent and then removed. Two things need attention: sourcing the salsify and keeping it from discoloring.
- Salsify itselfSalsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is a slender pale root sold at farmers' markets and some greengrocers in autumn and winter; scorzonera, the black-skinned relative, works identically. Look for firm roots roughly the thickness of a parsnip. The "oyster" name is traditionally attributed to a perceived resemblance in the cooked flesh.
- Scraping and browningCut salsify oxidizes to a dull grey-brown within minutes. Drop the slices into water acidulated with lemon juice or vinegar as you work, and they will stay pale.
- The salt codfishUse a piece of dried salt cod about the size of a deck of cards, soaked and rinsed first or the dish will be aggressively salty. It is a flavoring, not an ingredient: it goes in whole and comes out before serving. Do not salt the stewing water until you have tasted it at the end.
- Cooking timeThin slices stew tender in 15 to 20 minutes. Salsify goes from firm to mushy quickly, so test with a knife tip from about twelve minutes on.
- Thickening"Flour and butter rubbed together" is a beurre manié — equal weights kneaded to a paste, roughly a tablespoon of each for a pint of liquid. Whisk it in off the boil in small pieces and return to a simmer for a minute or two to cook out the raw flour.
- The toastPeriod cookery served creamed vegetables over toast as a matter of course; it soaks up the sauce and stands in for a starch. Cut it thick and toast it hard, or it collapses.
- YieldAbout a pound of trimmed salsify with sauce serves three or four as a side dish.
Salsify was widely grown in nineteenth-century American kitchen gardens and appears in household cookbooks of the period under the alternative name "vegetable oyster." The trick here ation— stewing it with a piece of salt cod and then withdrawing the fish — shows how far cooks would go to push the resemblance. The attribution is to the wife of John J. Bagley, governor of Michigan from 1873 to 1877; Buckeye Cookery (first published 1877 in Marysville, Ohio) collected contributions from prominent women across the Midwest, and such names lent the book authority as much as the recipes did. Salsify fell out of American gardens over the twentieth century.