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SALSIFY, WITH MELTED BUTTER (Gouffe's recipe)
Take four pounds of salsify; the leaves should be very fresh and the root black and firm. Cut off the roots and scrape them to remove the black skin entirely; throw them in a large basin of cold water with a little vinegar in it. Put in a three-quart stewpan half a pound of beef-suet, chopped fine; melt it over a slow fire, without colouring it. Add two quarts of water, a tea-spoonful of salt, and two table-spoonfuls of vinegar. Stir over the fire till it boils; add the salsify, previously cut into pieces two and a half inches long, and simmer for half an hour, with the lid not quite closed. Drain them well, and put them in a two-quart stewpan with a pint of melted butter; mix well, and serve.
A straightforward vegetable dish from Gouffé, but two things in it will mislead a modern reader: the fat-and-water bath the roots cook in, and what a Victorian cook meant by "melted butter".
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not liquid butterIn English cookery books of this period melted butter means a butter sauce thickened with flour and water or milk, roughly the consistency of thin cream. A pint of it for four pounds of root is generous; half that will coat the salsify without drowning it.
- The suet-and-water bath is a blancFat, water, salt and acid make a cooking liquor that keeps pale vegetables from darkening. Modern versions often use a tablespoon of flour whisked into the water instead of half a pound of beef suet, which achieves much the same thing and is far less rich. Neither the suet nor the cooking water is served.
- Black skin means scorzoneraTrue salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) has a pale tan skin; the black-skinned root Gouffé describes is scorzonera, sold in Europe as black salsify. Either works here. Both are sold trimmed of leaves now, so judge freshness by firmness rather than by the tops.
- Peel under acidulated waterCut surfaces oxidise to grey within minutes, which is why the recipe sends the scraped roots straight into vinegar water. The roots also exude a sticky white latex that is easier to keep off your hands with gloves.
- Half an hour is long for modern rootsThin cultivated salsify is tender in 15 to 20 minutes of gentle simmering. Test with a knife tip at 15 minutes; overcooked, it turns woolly and falls apart when you toss it in the sauce.
- Lid not quite closedThe gap lets steam escape, most likely to hold the liquor at a bare simmer rather than a hard boil that would break up the pieces. Keep it at a lazy bubble.
- Quantities and yieldFour pounds of untrimmed root scrapes down appreciably, to perhaps three pounds, enough for eight as a side dish. Three quarts and two quarts are the pan sizes, not the contents.
Jules Gouffé, once chef de cuisine at the Paris Jockey Club and a pupil of Carême, published Le Livre de Cuisine in 1867; his brother Alphonse, pastry cook to Queen Victoria, produced the English translation, which may help explain why Gouffé's recipes came to be quoted at length in British compilations like Cassell's. Salsify was a standard kitchen-garden root in nineteenth-century Europe, valued for a faintly sweet, mildly shellfish-like flavour that earned it the nickname oyster plant, though the resemblance is often said to be more suggestion than substance. It fell out of British and American cooking in the twentieth century, a decline often attributed to the fact that it is tedious to peel and does not keep well once cut, and it survives mainly in Belgian, French and Italian markets, where the black-skinned scorzonera is the more common form.