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Salsify, Boiled, Plain
Scrape the roots lightly, either cut them into three-inch lengths, or leave them whole, and throw them into water with a little lemon till wanted. Put them into boiling salt and water, and keep them boiling quickly till tender. Drain them, arrange on toast upon a hot dish, and pour over them good melted butter--white sauce, Dutch sauce, maitre d'hotel sauce, onion sauce, or Italian sauce, however, may be used. Sometimes the salsify is boiled in sauce flavoured with vegetables, herbs, and spices instead of water. Time to boil, about one hour. Probable cost, variable. Sufficient, a dozen roots for a dish.
A straightforward vegetable preparation whose only real trap is the stated boiling time. Salsify cooks far faster than Victorian kitchens allowed for, and the recipe's supporting details assume a nineteenth-century sauce vocabulary.
- The hour is far too longThree-inch lengths of salsify are tender in 20 to 30 minutes of gentle simmering, whole roots in perhaps 35 to 40. An hour at a fast boil reduces them to fibrous threads in a cloudy pan. Test with a knife tip from 20 minutes on.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn English cookery books of this period melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce, not clarified or simply liquefied butter. Roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, then a cup of water or the cooking liquid whisked in and simmered until smooth.
- Acidulated water is not optionalScraped salsify oxidises to grey-brown within a minute or two. The lemon water holds the colour, and adding a squeeze of lemon or a spoon of flour to the cooking water as well keeps the roots pale.
- Handling the rootsCut salsify bleeds a sticky white latex that dries to a varnish on hands and knives. Scrape under running water or wear gloves, and wipe the blade as you work.
- Which root you haveMarkets today often sell scorzonera, the black-skinned relative, rather than true white salsify. It behaves much the same here, though the dark skin needs peeling rather than light scraping.
- Boiling in flavoured liquidThe alternative mentioned at the end reads as something close to a blanc or vegetable court-bouillon: water with a little flour and lemon, a carrot, an onion, bay and peppercorns. Such a liquid seasons the root and helps keep it white.
- YieldA dozen roots is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb untrimmed and will serve about four as a side dish. Peeling loses a good deal, so buy generously.
- The toastA slice of toast beneath the vegetable is there to absorb the sauce, a common Victorian service. Modern plating is better served by draining the salsify well and saucing it directly.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) was widely grown in British and French kitchen gardens through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and turns up in Victorian cookery books far more often than it does in shops now. Its common English nickname, the oyster plant, is traditionally traced to a faintly marine sweetness that cooks of the period claimed to taste in the boiled root, though the resemblance is generally reported as slight. Cassell's treatment is typical of how the book handles vegetables: a plain boiling method followed by a list of interchangeable sauces from the standard repertoire, on the assumption that the reader already has a saucepan of Dutch or maitre d'hotel on hand. The vegetable's decline in the twentieth century probably owes as much to the labour of scraping and the sticky sap as to any change in taste, and it survives most reliably in French and Belgian cooking, where it is often sold ready-peeled in jars.