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SALSIFY (a la Creme)
Boil the roots till tender, or take the remnants of dressed salsify, and divide them into inch lengths. Dissolve a slice of butter in a saucepan, and work into this as much flour as it will take. When the paste is quite smooth, and before it is at all coloured, moisten with milk or cream, season with salt and cayenne, and stir it over the fire till it coats the spoon. Put in the slices of salsify, let them get hot, and serve in a pyramid form on a hot dish. Add a spoonful of lemon-juice to the sauce, pour it over the roots, and garnish with fried sippets. Time altogether, one hour and a half.
A plain white sauce built in the pan and folded round cooked root — the whole thing stands or falls on keeping the roux pale and the salsify from turning grey. The stated hour and a half covers boiling the roots from raw; leftover cooked salsify makes it a ten-minute dish.
- Finding salsifyTragopogon porrifolius, the oyster plant, sold in winter at greengrocers and farmers' markets; black-skinned scorzonera behaves identically and can be substituted. Look for firm roots with the skin intact, not limp or forked ones.
- Peel into acid waterCut salsify oxidises to a dull brown within a minute or two and leaks a sticky white latex. Peel under running water and drop the pieces straight into water with lemon juice or a spoonful of vinegar, and cook them in the same acidulated water.
- The real boiling timeTwenty to thirty-five minutes in salted water, depending on thickness, until a knife tip goes through without resistance. The book's hour and a half is total elapsed kitchen time including peeling and sauce, not a boiling instruction.
- Quantities for the sauce"A slice of butter" and "as much flour as it will take" amount in practice to roughly equal weights of each: for about 1 lb of cooked salsify, 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint (a scant cup and a quarter) of milk or cream will do. Cook the roux a minute without colour before the liquid goes in.
- Coats the spoonThe test is the old nappe — draw a finger across the back of the spoon and the line should hold. That is roughly the thickness of pouring cream; it will tighten further once the hot salsify goes in.
- Lemon juice last, off the heatAcid stirred into a hot milk sauce over direct flame can cause it to split, though the flour gives some protection. Safest to stir the spoonful in after the pan is off the fire and serve at once.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter or clarified butter until crisp, arranged round the edge of the dish. Cut them from a firm white loaf, not a soft sandwich bread, or they collapse.
- YieldA pound of prepared roots with this quantity of sauce serves four as a vegetable course alongside roast or boiled meat.
Salsify was a standard kitchen-garden root in Britain and America through the nineteenth century, valued partly because it cropped in winter and partly for the faint shellfish note that earned it the name oyster plant — a resemblance often insisted upon in period cookbooks and rarely detected by modern eaters. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium of the Victorian era, treats salsify in the French manner (here à la crème), which reflects how thoroughly English middle-class cookery of the period took its vegetable treatments from French practice. The instruction to serve "in a pyramid form" with fried sippets round the edge is pure period table style: vegetables were built up rather than spread out, and a crisp garnish was expected to supply the contrast a creamed dish lacked. Salsify fell out of general use in the twentieth century, though the reasons are not well documented.