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Turnips, Boiled and Served with Sauce
Boil the turnips as in the last recipe. Put them in a tureen grate a little nutmeg over them and cover with good melted butter. If preferred omit the nutmeg, and stir a spoonful of freshly-mixed mustard into the sauce before pouring it over the vegetables. Turnips served in this way may be sliced, cut into dice, or turned into any fanciful shapes before being boiled. Time to boil twenty minutes to an hour and a half according to age and size. Probable cost 6d. per bunch. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain boiled vegetable with a sauce, but two phrases in it mean something different now than they did in the 1870s.
- "Good melted butter" is a sauceIn Victorian usage melted butter is a thickened butter sauce, not butter melted in a pan: butter cooked with a little flour and let down with water or milk to about half a pint, then seasoned. Simply pouring liquid butter over the turnips gives a greasy dish and misses the point of the recipe.
- The mustard variant"Freshly-mixed mustard" means dry mustard powder stirred with a little cold water and left five to ten minutes to develop its heat. A spoonful of that in half a pint of sauce is assertive; prepared jarred mustard is milder and you may want a little more.
- The boiling timeTwenty minutes to an hour and a half is a wide span, and the recipe itself puts it down to age and size. Young turnips cut into dice or slices need 8-12 minutes; whole medium ones 20-30. Test with a knife tip and stop the moment they yield, as overcooked turnip turns watery and sulphurous.
- Salt and waterBoil in well-salted water, uncovered, and drain thoroughly. Turnips hold a surprising amount of water; leave them a minute in the hot dry pan before saucing or the sauce will thin out in the tureen.
- "Turned into fanciful shapes"Turning means paring into small even barrel or olive shapes with a small knife so that the pieces cook uniformly and look neat. Dice of about half an inch achieve the same result with less waste.
- Yield and costFive or six as a side dish. The recipe gives no weight, only a price per bunch, and that sixpence is a period figure telling you only that this was among the cheapest things on the table.
- NutmegGrate it over the hot turnips just before the sauce goes on. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of its volatile oil and will read as dusty rather than warm.
Turnips were the cheap winter vegetable of the English kitchen long before the potato displaced them, valued as human food and also as the field crop that let farmers keep cattle through the winter. The dish is really a lesson in one sauce: melted butter, the flour-thickened foundation that nineteenth-century English cooks poured over nearly every boiled vegetable and much of the fish. The mustard variation points to the same instinct that pairs mustard with boiled beef and with turnip's relatives in the cabbage family, sharpness against a sweet, slightly earthy root. That the book bothers to give a price per bunch is characteristic of the period's cookery dictionaries, which were written for households managing a fixed weekly budget and expected to be consulted like a reference work rather than read through.