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Salsify, Boiled
The roots are boiled like carrots, or half boiled and grated fine, made into flat small patties, dipped in batter, and fried like oysters, which they strongly resemble; hence the name of vegetable oyster frequently used for salsify. The young flower-stalks, if cut in the spring of the second year, and dressed like asparagus. are not unlike the latter, and make an excellent dish.
The entry assumes you already know how to boil a carrot, so the useful detail is in handling the root itself, which behaves unlike anything else in the vegetable drawer.
- Stop it browningPeeled salsify discolours quickly, and it exudes a sticky white sap that clings to hands and knives. Peel or scrape it straight into water with lemon juice or a spoonful of vinegar, and cook it in the same acidulated water.
- "Boiled like carrots" in practiceWhole roots of thumb thickness take 20 to 30 minutes in salted water to become tender; cut into two-inch lengths they take 15 to 20. Test with a skewer rather than a clock, as older, woodier roots can be stubborn at the core.
- The half-boiled pattiesFor the fritters, boil until a skewer just enters, then grate or mash while warm and bind with a little egg and flour. A cold, wet mash will not hold a cake; drain the grated root well and let the steam escape before shaping.
- Batter and fryingA plain flour-and-egg batter or a beer batter both work. Fry at 350 to 375F until the crust sets golden, two to three minutes a side, since the interior is already cooked and long frying only dries it.
- The flower-stalk dishOnly a plant left in the ground over winter produces the shoots described, and they must be cut in spring before the bud opens or they turn bitter and fibrous. Treat them as thin asparagus: four to six minutes in boiling salted water, then butter.
- What you are likely to buyMarkets often sell black-skinned scorzonera under the name salsify. It cooks the same way and tastes much the same, though the skin is thinner and easier to scrape than to peel.
- QuantityAllow about 8 oz of unpeeled root per person as a side dish; trimming and peeling loses a fair proportion. A pound of prepared root makes roughly eight small patties.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) was a standard kitchen-garden root in Britain and America through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the name "vegetable oyster" or "oyster plant" that Cassell's mentions was in common use on both sides of the Atlantic. The comparison is usually put down to a faint marine sweetness in the cooked root, and fried patties like these sit alongside the mock-oyster fritters and mock-oyster soups that fill American cookbooks of the same period, dishes that made sense in inland households where real oysters were expensive or unobtainable. The passage's note on cutting the second-year flower stalks is a gardener's aside as much as a cook's: salsify is biennial, and a bed left to overwinter gave a spring shoot crop before the plant bolted and the root turned woody. It fell out of fashion in the twentieth century -- tedious peeling is often blamed -- and it is now found mostly in French cooking and at farmers' markets.