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GARNISH (a la Jardiniere)
Wash and peel a small turnip, and cook it in salted water until tender, then strain and rub it through a sieve with a wooden spoon. Mix one ounce of butter with a dessert-spoonful of flour, stir it over the fire for a few minutes, add the turnip pulp, half a gill of bechamel sauce (see BECHAMEL SAUCE), salt, pepper, and a pinch of grated nutmeg; let it come to a boil, then stir in a quarter of a gill of cream, and keep hot. If too thick, add a little milk or white stock. Take a pint of various kinds of vegetables, such as green peas, French beans (cut into short pieces), turnips and carrots (cut into fancy shapes), cauliflower buds, asparagus tips, etc. Boil in salted water until tender, strain, and put with the sauce. Let it get thoroughly hot without boiling, add half an ounce of butter, and serve round a dish of lamb cutlets or other entree. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A turnip purée thickened with a small roux and béchamel, used as a bed for a mixed spring vegetable garnish around cutlets. The whole point is that nothing boils once the vegetables go in.
- Gills and dessert-spoonsAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill of béchamel is about 2.5 fl oz (a scant third of a cup) and a quarter gill of cream is roughly 2 tablespoons. A dessert-spoonful sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon: 2 teaspoons is the usual reading.
- Don't boil after the vegetables go inOnce the cooked vegetables meet the sauce it is heated through only. Boiling breaks the cream, greys the peas and beans, and collapses the cauliflower buds into the purée.
- The turnip must be dryTurnip holds a great deal of water. Drain it hard and let it steam off in the pan before sieving, or the purée will thin the sauce and you will be adding flour to correct what draining would have fixed.
- Cook the roux out"Stir it over the fire for a few minutes" means cooking the butter and flour until it smells nutty rather than pasty, but without colouring it. This is a white roux; browning it would muddy the dish.
- Cook the vegetables separatelyThe recipe boils them together for convenience, but peas, French beans, carrot and turnip shapes, cauliflower and asparagus tips all have different times. Cook each to tenderness and refresh briefly if you want the greens to stay green.
- "Fancy shapes"The jardinière cut is small, even batons; definitions vary, broadly somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 in square and an inch or less long, or discs and lozenges cut with a small cutter. Uniformity is the whole visual argument for the garnish.
- BéchamelThe book cross-refers to its own BECHAMEL SAUCE entry; period English béchamel was commonly built on white stock as well as milk rather than milk alone. A few tablespoons of any well-made béchamel will do; a jarred white sauce will taste of nothing here.
- YieldA pint of mixed vegetables plus the purée would probably serve four to six as an accompaniment. The stated probable cost is 1s 6d; how that sat in a household budget is not something the entry tells us.
À la jardinière — in the gardener's manner — is one of the standing French garnish names that Victorian and Edwardian English kitchens adopted wholesale, and it meant, then as now, a mixture of fresh spring vegetables cut small and neat. A garnish in the period sense was a component, learned once and applied to any number of entrées: lamb cutlets here, but equally sweetbreads, veal or a fricassée. The turnip purée underneath acts as a bed that holds the cut vegetables in place on the dish and keeps them from sliding into the gravy. The insistence on fancy shapes and uniform pieces reflects a service style in which the entrée arrived at table whole and was looked at before it was eaten.