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Galsify, Fried
Make a batter as follows. Take six spoonfuls of flour, a small pinch of salt, a spoonful of olive-oil, and beat the whole with beer enough to make it into batter, but do not make it too liquid. Then beat the whites of two eggs, and when well beaten pour them into the batter, which you must keep stirring gently. Next put the vegetables, which should have been done beforehand and well drained in a cloth, into the batter; then take them out again one by one, and throw them into the dripping. Use a skewer to prevent their sticking together. When fried of a fine colour and crisp, send them up with fried parsley in the centre of the dish, and a little pounded salt sprinkled over the vegetables.
A beer-batter fritter of salsify, from a period when the root was common on English tables. The recipe assumes you already know how to cook salsify; almost everything that can go wrong happens before the batter.
- The title is a misprint"Galsify" is salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), the long pale root sometimes sold as oyster plant. Scorzonera, its black-skinned relative, behaves the same way and can be used interchangeably.
- The hinge: cook and dry the roots first"Done beforehand and well drained in a cloth" is the whole recipe. Peeled salsify oxidises to a dull grey within minutes, so drop it into water with lemon juice or vinegar as you work, then simmer until just tender, 15-25 minutes depending on thickness. Batter will slide off any root that is still damp.
- SpoonfulsRead these as tablespoons: six of flour is roughly 45-50 g, with a tablespoon of oil. The beer is added by eye until the batter coats without running; the recipe's own warning is not to make it too liquid, so add it a little at a time and stop short of pourable.
- BeerA period batter would most likely have used a mild ale or small beer. Any lightly hopped lager or pale ale works; heavily hopped modern IPAs turn bitter in hot fat.
- The whitesWhipped whites folded in at the last moment are what makes this batter puff. Fold gently and fry at once; the lift goes out of the batter as it stands.
- DrippingBeef dripping, heated to 350-375F. Any neutral high-smoke-point oil substitutes. The skewer is there because salsify batons fuse together in the pan, so add them a few at a time and separate them as they set.
- Fried parsleyVery dry curly parsley sprigs, dropped into the same fat for 15-30 seconds until crisp and still green. Wet parsley will spit violently; shake and blot it thoroughly first.
- YieldAbout 1 lb of prepared salsify serves four as a side dish. The batter quantity given is modest for that amount; scale it up if you run short.
Salsify was widely grown in English and French kitchen gardens from the seventeenth century onward, valued for a mild root flavour that cooks compared to oysters -- the usual explanation for the common name oyster plant. It sits here among fried-vegetable entries at a period when the friture of blanched vegetables in beer batter, a French borrowing, was being taken up in English cookery books. The use of beer rather than water was thought to produce a lighter crust; the trick outlasted the vegetable's popularity, since salsify largely disappeared from British greengrocers in the twentieth century while beer batter did not. Fried parsley heaped in the centre of the dish was a common garnish for deep-fried dishes and appears frequently in Victorian cookery books.