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Salsify Croquettes
Wash, scrape, and boil the salsify till perfectly tender. Rub it through a colander or mash it, and mix with the puree a little butter, cream, salt, cayenne, and lemon-juice: beat it till the ingredients are thoroughly mixed and constitute a stiff smooth paste. Place this on ice, and when it is quite cold, shape it into the form of corks. Dip these into clarified butter, or, if preferred, into beaten egg and grated bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot fat till crisp and brown. Lift them up, drain, and serve.
A straightforward vegetable croquette that depends entirely on getting the paste stiff and thoroughly cold before it meets the fat. The recipe gives no quantities, so treat it as a method for however much salsify you have.
- The hinge: chill it hard"Place this on ice" means refrigerate until the paste is cold all the way through, an hour or two at least. A barely cool mixture will slump in the pan and the coating will burst.
- Salsify browns on contact with airScraped roots discolour within minutes. Drop them into water with a squeeze of lemon as you work, and boil them in the same acidulated water. Expect 20 to 30 minutes for pieces of root, longer for whole ones.
- Getting a stiff pasteSalsify puree is wetter than potato and often will not hold on butter and cream alone. Dry the mash over low heat for a few minutes, and if it still slackens add an egg yolk or a spoonful of mashed potato as a binder.
- Butter or egg and crumbsThe clarified-butter dip gives almost no crust. Egg and fine dry breadcrumbs is the more reliable option, and a second coat of egg and crumbs is worth the trouble for anything shaped this loosely.
- Frying temperature"Hot fat" here means deep fat at 350-375F. Below that the croquettes soak; much above and the crumbs colour before the inside warms through. Fry in small batches so the temperature holds.
- SeasoningCayenne in a recipe of this kind means a pinch, not a teaspoon. Season the paste while it is warm and taste it, bearing in mind that seasoning can read differently once the mixture is cold.
- Shape and yield"The form of corks" means short cylinders about the size of a wine cork, an inch and a half to two inches long. The recipe gives no quantities, so yield depends on how much salsify you start with.
- SourcingSalsify appears at farmers' markets in autumn and winter and is sometimes sold as oyster plant or vegetable oyster; black-skinned scorzonera works the same way. Canned salsify, if you find it, is already soft and needs only draining and drying.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) was a standard kitchen-garden root in Britain and America through the nineteenth century, valued for a faint shellfish note in its flavour that earned it the names oyster plant and vegetable oyster; the mock-oyster association is traditional rather than anything a chemist has pinned down. The recipe sits among a group of croquette methods, the croquette being a common Victorian way of turning a cooked, mashable ingredient into a hot savoury course, and salsify's mild sweetness took kindly to butter, cream and a crumb crust. The vegetable's decline in Anglo-American cooking in the twentieth century is usually put down to the fiddly scraping and the sticky white sap rather than to any fault of flavour, and it has come back mainly through restaurant menus and market growers.