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Salsify, Stewed
Scrape and wash the roots, and cut them into round slices. Boil them in as much water as will barely cover them, and when they are tender lift them out with a slice, and pour away all but a quarter of a pint of the liquor. Thicken this with flour and butter, stir half a cupful of cream into it, and season with pepper and salt. Let it simmer gently for a few minutes. Put the salsify into a hot dish, pour the sauce over it, and serve. Time, one hour.
A plain white-sauce vegetable dish that needs two adjustments: keep the cut roots from browning, and ignore the stated hour.
- TimeOne hour is far longer than sliced salsify needs. Rounds about a quarter-inch thick are tender in 15 to 25 minutes depending on the age of the root; past that they turn to mush and the flavour flattens. The hour in the original probably covers scraping, boiling and saucing together.
- BrowningSalsify oxidises to a dull grey-brown within minutes of being scraped. Drop the slices straight into water with a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of vinegar, and add a little lemon to the cooking water as well. The recipe assumes you work fast enough not to notice.
- A quarter of a pintIn this book that is an imperial quarter-pint, 5 fl oz, so about two-thirds of a US cup. If your pan has boiled down to less, top it up rather than reducing the sauce further.
- "A slice"A slice is a flat perforated server or skimmer. A slotted spoon does the same job. The point is to lift the roots out without breaking them, since the cooking liquor becomes the sauce.
- Thicken with flour and butterWork equal weights of soft butter and flour into a paste, about a tablespoon of each for this quantity, and whisk it into the simmering liquor in small pieces. Simmer three or four minutes so the flour loses its raw taste before the cream goes in.
- CreamVictorian cream was unstandardised and often richer than modern single cream, so heavy cream is the safer substitution here. Once it is added, keep the pan at a bare simmer rather than letting it boil hard.
- QuantityNo amount of salsify is given. Roughly 1 lb of roots, trimmed, serves three or four as a side, and the sauce as measured is about right for that.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is a Mediterranean root long grown in European kitchen gardens and widely called the oyster plant, from a supposed faint marine sweetness in the cooked root; it appears in nineteenth-century American recipes for mock oyster soup and fritters for that reason. Cassell's places it among the plainer boiled vegetables, dressed in a butter-flour-and-cream sauce of the kind also used for vegetables such as seakale and celery. Its near relation scorzonera, with a black skin and similar flavour, is sometimes listed separately in the same books. Salsify fell out of general use in the twentieth century; the tedium of scraping the long, forked, quick-browning roots is often cited as one reason. It still turns up in market gardens and seed catalogues.