Home › Vegetables › Turnips
Turnips
Wash, peel, cut in thin slices across the grain, and place in kettle in as little water as possible; boil from half to three-quarters of an hour or until you can easily pierce them with a fork; drain well, season with salt, pepper and butter, mash fine and place on stove, stirring frequently until water is all dried out. Do not boil too long, as they are much sweeter when cooked quickly. Turnips may be steamed and finished as above, and are better than when boiled. They may also be sliced and baked.
A plain nineteenth-century mash that still works, with one instruction worth taking seriously: the final drying-out on the stove is what separates a good turnip mash from a watery one.
- Which turnip"Turnip" in nineteenth-century American books may mean either the white purple-top turnip or the larger yellow rutabaga, often called Swede or yellow turnip; this recipe does not say which. Rutabaga is denser and needs the longer end of the cooking range; small white turnips can be done in 20 minutes.
- Slice across the grainCutting crosswise rather than lengthwise shortens the fibres, which matters for older, woody roots. Peel generously — the outer layer under the skin is tough and bitter in anything larger than a tennis ball.
- "As little water as possible"An inch in the bottom of the pan is enough. Turnips are mostly water and will give up plenty of their own; flooding them leaches out sugar and leaves you fighting to drive the moisture off later.
- TimingHalf to three-quarters of an hour is generous by modern standards. Test at 20 minutes with thin slices and pull them the moment a fork goes through without resistance. The book's own note is the right one — long boiling turns them sulphurous and flat.
- The drying stepThis is the hinge. After mashing, return the pan to a low burner and stir until the mash stops steaming freely and pulls away from the sides. Skip it and the butter separates into a grey puddle.
- Steaming, as recommendedThe book is correct that steamed turnips beat boiled. Fifteen to twenty-five minutes in a steamer basket, then mash and dry as above.
- BakingThe book gives no temperature for the sliced-and-baked variation. A moderate oven, around 350°F, in a covered dish with butter, about an hour, works. Uncovered and hotter, around 425°F, they will brown and caramelise instead.
- YieldTwo pounds of trimmed turnip makes about four side-dish servings; expect some loss in peeling and cooking.
Turnips were a workhorse root of the American kitchen garden, cheap to grow, tolerant of frost, and storable in a cellar or clamp through the winter — which is why a book like Buckeye Cookery (published in Marysville, Ohio, in its early printings variously dated 1876 and 1877, the latter a revision, as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping) treats them as a matter of course rather than a novelty. The insistence that they are "much sweeter when cooked quickly" may reflect real kitchen experience: prolonged boiling is often said to break down the glucosinolates that give brassicas their characteristic bite into sharper sulphur compounds, though the connection between that chemistry and the book's remark is inference rather than anything the compilers set down. The preference for steaming over boiling, stated here plainly, appears to echo a theme in late-century domestic writing, which seems increasingly to have argued that vegetables lost their goodness into the pot water.