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Garnish, Turnips For
Peel, wash, and drain a number of small young turnips. Boil them for five minutes in salted water, and drain them again. Put one ounce of butter in a stewpan, add the turnips, and fry them to a good colour, which will take about eight minutes. Drain well, and boil in stock, or along with the meat or fowl for which they are intended, for fifteen minutes. Serve arranged round the dish. Probable cost, 6d.
A straightforward three-stage treatment — blanch, brown, finish in stock — that still produces the best glazed turnips you can put round a joint. A few of the instructions need translating.
- "Small young turnips"The recipe specifies only small, young roots, presumably sweet and thin-skinned. Large maincrop turnips or swedes will be coarser and more peppery; if that is all you have, cut them into even 1-inch chunks or turn them into barrel shapes so they cook at the same rate.
- Quantity and yieldNo number is given. About 1½ lb (700 g) of small turnips would garnish a joint or a whole fowl for six.
- StewpanA straight-sided pan, heavier and deeper than a frying pan. Use one wide enough for the turnips to sit in a single layer, or they will steam rather than colour.
- The hinge: drain them dryBoth drainings matter. Wet turnips will not take colour in an ounce of butter, and the eight minutes of frying will pass with nothing to show for it. Tip them onto a cloth after blanching and let the surface moisture go.
- The blanchingFive minutes in salted water is a par-boil, not a cooking. It draws off some of the raw mustard sharpness and gives the butter something to caramelise against.
- Finishing in stockFifteen minutes in stock finishes the cooking; if you reduce the liquid down at the end you will get the familiar glaze. If you cook them alongside the meat, the recipe's fifteen minutes means adding them only for the last quarter-hour.
- "Probable cost, 6d."Sixpence is the book's own estimate for the garnish, one of the costings Cassell's gives throughout.
Cassell's places this among garnishes rather than vegetable dishes, which tells you how a Victorian dinner was assembled: the joint or bird came to table dressed, and the ring of glazed turnips round the dish was part of its appearance as much as its flavour. The method is the classical French one — navets glacés, blanched, coloured in butter and finished in stock — and English cookery books of the period drew heavily on French professional practice. Turnips had long been an everyday root of the British table, grown as fodder as well as food, and the technique here is essentially a way of flattering a cheap vegetable with butter and good stock.