Home › The Principles of Cookery › SALSIFY, BOILED (another way)
SALSIFY, BOILED (another way)
Scrape the roots gently, so as to strip them only of the outside peel. Then cut them into pieces of an equal size, about four inches, and throw them into water with a little vinegar or lemon-juice, to prevent their getting black. When you have scraped a sufficient quantity, boil them in water enough for them to swim with ease; add a little salt, a piece of butter, and the juice of a lemon. Salsify will generally be done in three-quarters of an hour; yet it is better to ascertain the fact by taking a piece out of the water, and trying with a knife whether it is done enough, which is the case when the knife penetrates easily. Drain the salsifies, and send them up with whatever sauce you think proper. They are generally served with veloute or French melted butter.
A straightforward boil, but salsify oxidises the moment it is cut and the timing given is for roots much thicker than most sold today.
- Acidulated water is not optionalSalsify blackens within a minute or two of being scraped, and the discolouration goes deeper than the surface. Have a bowl of cold water with a splash of vinegar or lemon juice ready before you pick up the knife, and drop each piece in as it is cut.
- Scrape, do not peelThe instruction to strip only the outside peel matters; the flavour is often said to sit just under the skin, and heavy peeling wastes a thin root. A vegetable peeler is easier than a knife, but keep the strokes light. Wearing gloves saves you from the sticky white latex the roots exude.
- TimingThree-quarters of an hour suits the thick, mature roots of a Victorian kitchen garden. Modern salsify, usually finger-thick, is tender in 15 to 25 minutes. The knife test in the original is the reliable guide; overcooked salsify collapses into strings.
- "Water enough for them to swim"A generous, loose boil rather than a crowded pan, so the pieces cook evenly. The butter and lemon go into the cooking water, not onto the finished dish.
- VeloutéA white sauce built on veal or chicken stock rather than milk, finished with butter and sometimes egg yolk and cream. Any light chicken-stock-based sauce serves the same purpose.
- "French melted butter"Generally distinguished from the flour-thickened English melted butter of the period: butter worked with a little water and lemon into a smooth sauce, though period versions vary — in modern terms, close to a beurre monté or a simple butter sauce.
- YieldReckon on about 1 lb of roots for three or four as a side dish; the loss to scraping is considerable.
- Worth knowingBoiled salsify takes very well to a second cooking — drained, dried, then browned in butter, or dipped in batter and fried, both of which appear elsewhere in Victorian vegetable cookery.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) was a standard kitchen-garden root in Britain and France through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prized for a faint sweetness often compared to oysters or artichoke hearts — hence the common English name "oyster plant". The tone of this entry, with its French sauces and its instruction to "send them up", places it squarely in the tradition of the professional household kitchen that Cassell's was digesting for middle-class readers: the vegetable is treated as a course in its own right, dressed with a stock-based sauce, rather than as an afterthought beside the meat. Salsify fell out of general British use during the twentieth century, partly because it is fiddly to prepare and does not store or ship well once cut, and it survives now mainly in French cooking and at farmers' markets, where it is sometimes sold alongside or confused with scorzonera, the black-skinned root that is cooked in exactly the same way.