Home › The Principles of Cookery › Salsify, with Veloute
Salsify, with Veloute
Prepare as in the preceding recipe. Only take note that all sauces sent up with vegetables should be refined and thickened with fresh butter. Never forget to add salt and a little cayenne.
A cross-reference entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have just read the preceding salsify method and are only being told how to finish the sauce. The useful content is the sauce discipline, and that transfers to any boiled root vegetable.
- What velouté means hereA blond roux — equal butter and flour cooked until it smells nutty but takes no colour — moistened with white veal or chicken stock and simmered until it coats a spoon. For a vegetable service, some of the salsify cooking liquid can replace part of the stock.
- "Refined" means strained"Refined" most likely means passed through a fine sieve or tammy cloth to remove any grain from the roux, though the book does not define the term. A conical strainer and the back of a ladle does the same work.
- Thickened with fresh butterThis is monter au beurre: cold butter whisked into the finished sauce off the heat, a piece at a time. Do not let it boil afterwards or the emulsion breaks and the sauce turns greasy.
- Cayenne, not pepperCayenne was often called for in white sauces on the grounds that black pepper leaves visible specks. A pinch is enough — it should sharpen the sauce, not announce itself.
- Keeping the salsify whitePeeled salsify oxidises to grey within minutes. Drop the pieces into water with lemon juice or vinegar as you work, and cook them in a blanc: water with a spoonful of flour whisked in, plus lemon and salt.
- Cooking timeSalsify batons of finger length take roughly 15–25 minutes at a bare simmer, depending on age and thickness. Test with a knife tip; overcooked roots collapse into threads.
- QuantityThe original gives none. Reckon about 500 g of trimmed salsify and 300 ml of finished velouté to serve four as a side dish.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) was a standard winter root in nineteenth-century English kitchen gardens, valued for a faint shellfish sweetness that earned it the nickname "vegetable oyster" — a comparison found in Victorian garden writing, though it is more suggestion than resemblance. The real subject of this note is the rule rather than the root: that a sauce accompanying a vegetable must be sieved, finished with raw butter and seasoned decisively. That reflects the Franco-English professional kitchen of the period, in which velouté was counted among a small set of leading or "mother" sauces from which a cook was expected to build others, and the boiled vegetable existed largely as a vehicle for it. Salsify has since drifted out of English shops, though it remains common in Belgian and northern French markets.