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Salsify, Fried, or Salsify Fritters
Boil the salsify till tender, or, if preferred, take the remains of cooked salsify. Drain and dry the roots by pressing them in a soft cloth. Make a little frying batter, dip all the roots separately into this, throw them into hot fat, and fry them till they are lightly browned. Take them up, drain them on a sieve, and serve very hot, piled high on a dish, and garnished with fried parsley. No sauce will be needed for them when dressed in this way. Sometimes the salsify is dipped into egg and bread-crumbs instead of batter before frying. When batter is used it may be made as follows. Put three table-spoonfuls of flour into a bowl with a salt-spoonful of salt and an ounce of fresh butter, Add as much lukewarm water as will melt the butter, and beat the whole to a smooth batter. Put it into a cold place, and ten minutes before it is wanted add the well-whisked white of an egg. The salsify is occasionally soaked in vinegar, with a little pepper and salt, before it is fried, but this is not necessary. When done, the roots should be thoroughly drained. Time, one hour to boil the salsify; to be fried till crisp.
A straightforward fritter, but salsify behaves in ways that catch out cooks who have never handled it. Two details matter more than the batter: keeping the peeled roots from discolouring, and getting them genuinely dry before they meet the batter.
- Acidulated water firstPeeled salsify oxidises to a dull grey-brown within minutes. Drop the cut roots straight into water with lemon juice or vinegar, and boil them in the same acidulated water. This is the step the recipe assumes you already know.
- One hour is too longOne hour is long -- Cassell's boiling time suits thick winter roots cut in lengths; smaller modern roots, or scorzonera, may be tender well before an hour. Test with a knife tip from about twenty minutes, since overboiled salsify collapses in the fryer.
- Dry them properlyPressing in a soft cloth is not fussiness. Wet roots make the batter slide off and cause the fat to spit. Let them cool and steam-dry before coating.
- Frying temperature"Hot fat" for a coated, already-cooked vegetable means 350 to 375F. Below that the batter absorbs grease; above it, the outside colours before the root heats through.
- The batterThree tablespoons flour, a scant quarter teaspoon salt (a salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon), one ounce butter, and only as much warm water as will melt the butter and bring it to a coating consistency; the recipe gives no measure, so add it a little at a time. The batter is meant to rest in a cold place, with the whisked egg white folded in ten minutes before frying, which is what keeps it light.
- Fried parsleyFlat-leaf or curly parsley, thoroughly dry, dropped into the same fat for a few seconds until it stops sizzling and turns brilliant green. Wet parsley will erupt, so shake it out well and stand back.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of salsify; this amount of batter will coat roughly a pound, enough for about three or four as a side dish. Fry in small batches and hold on a rack rather than stacking, or the crust softens.
- SubstitutionSome produce sold as salsify is in fact black-skinned scorzonera, a different plant that is sweeter and slightly less fibrous. Parsnip cut in fingers takes the same treatment if salsify is unavailable, though it is markedly sweeter.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) was a standard kitchen-garden root in Britain and America through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its common English name, oyster plant, points to the faint marine sweetness cooks claimed to taste in it. That association is why so many period cookbooks pair it with the treatments given to shellfish, batter-frying and mock oyster fritters among them. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s for a large middle-class readership, is characteristically thorough here: it offers batter, offers egg and crumbs as an alternative, mentions the optional vinegar soak and then tells the reader plainly it is unnecessary, which is the tone of the whole book. Salsify fell out of general use in the twentieth century, largely because it is tedious to peel and does not keep well once cut, and it survives mostly in French cooking and in the seed catalogues of gardeners who like an unusual root.