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Salsify Sauce
Scrape and wash two roots of salsify, rub them with lemon, and throw them into cold water till wanted. Boil the roots till perfectly tender in slightly-salted water. Drain them, cut them into small pieces, stir these into half a pint of melted butter, simmer a few minutes, and serve. Time, one hour and a quarter.
A short recipe that hides two traps: the meaning of "melted butter" and the stated cooking time.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian English usage melted butter means the standard flour-thickened butter sauce — roughly 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint of water or light stock, cooked out smooth. Plain liquid butter will not hold the salsify in suspension and the dish will separate.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That gives enough sauce for four modest servings alongside boiled or poached poultry, veal or white fish.
- The time is misleadingSalsify roots of finger thickness are tender in 20 to 30 minutes; thick old roots may take 45. The stated hour and a quarter most likely covers the whole operation — scraping, soaking and sauce-making — rather than the boiling alone, and salsify boiled that long collapses into fibres.
- Why the lemon and the cold waterCut salsify discolours quickly once exposed to air. Rubbing with lemon and holding the roots in cold water as directed helps keep the finished dish pale and clean rather than muddy.
- Salsify itselfSold as oyster plant or vegetable oyster, a long tapering pale root sometimes shelved beside parsnips or its black-skinned relative scorzonera. Scrape rather than peel deeply; the flavour sits just under the skin.
- Sticky handsThe cut root exudes a milky latex that dries gummy on knives and fingers. Work under running water or wear gloves, and wipe the blade as you go.
- FinishingSimmer the cut root in the sauce only long enough to heat through, two or three minutes. Season with salt, white pepper and a little lemon juice at the end — the sauce is bland without it.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) was a standard kitchen-garden root in Britain and America through the nineteenth century, valued for a faint shellfish note that earned it the names oyster plant and vegetable oyster; cookbooks of the period fry it in cakes, stew it in milk, and — as here — serve it bound in a white sauce to be spooned over boiled meats. It belongs to the older English table where a dozen simple flour-and-butter sauces, each flavoured with one thing, were the standard accompaniment to plainly boiled food. Salsify has since largely dropped out of English-speaking kitchens, holding on in parts of continental Europe, where it is still grown and eaten; the effort of scraping the sticky, tapering roots is usually blamed for its decline.