Home › The Principles of Cookery › Turnips, Brown Puree Of
Turnips, Brown Puree Of
Instead of blanching the turnips, sweat them on a slow fire in a little butter. Take care they do not burn. When they are well done moisten with three spoonfuls of sauce tournee and one spoonful of veal gravy. Give them a good seasoning rub them through a tamis, and send up with fried toasts of bread. Never omit putting in a small lump of sugar before you serve up to overcome the bitter taste of the turnips. Such entremets are not much approved of in England, but in winter, and in the country, you very often have no choice for second courses.
A purée in the older French sense: vegetables stewed in butter rather than boiled, bound with a made sauce and forced through a sieve. The instructions assume a professional larder, so the two sauces are the only real obstacles.
- Sauce tournéeA pale velouté — blond roux let down with white veal or chicken stock and cooked until it clears. Three spoonfuls of a good unsalted chicken velouté, or simply reduced stock finished with a little beurre manié, does the same job.
- Veal gravyIn period usage this means strong veal stock or broth, reduced, not a thickened gravy. A tablespoon of well-reduced brown stock or demi-glace is the nearest modern stand-in. Where the "brown" of the title actually comes from is not explained in the recipe: one spoonful of gravy against three of pale sauce tournee will not by itself darken the dish.
- "Spoonfuls"Period spoon measures are inexact. Read them as tablespoons and adjust: the purée should be thick enough to hold a shape on the spoon, not pourable.
- Sweating is the hingeSlow fire means genuinely low heat, so the turnips soften in their own moisture and butter rather than frying. The recipe's only instruction is that they must not burn: any scorch turns the whole purée acrid, and turnips catch quickly once their water has gone.
- TamisA drum sieve. A fine-mesh strainer and a stiff spatula work; a food processor gives a smoother but slacker result, since turnips throw a good deal of water.
- The sugarNot optional in the original's view. A small lump — say a scant teaspoon — offsets the mustard-oil bitterness of older, larger winter turnips. Young spring turnips need little or none, so taste first.
- Fried toastsCroutes: bread fried crisp and set round the purée. The recipe specifies neither the shape of the pieces nor the fat they are fried in.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a working guide, about 2 lb of turnips would make four modest side servings once sieved. Season firmly; sieved root vegetables absorb salt and flatten without it.
Turnips were the winter vegetable of the English countryside, stored in clamps and available long after anything green had gone, which is exactly the resignation behind the closing line about having "no choice for second courses." The recipe belongs to the French service that dominated grand English kitchens through the nineteenth century, where entremets covered the made dishes of the second course, sweet ones among them, and where sauce tourn textacute;e was one of the standing foundation sauces kept ready in the larder. Cassell's, compiling in the 1870s and after, appears to reproduce a good deal of this earlier professional material, and the frank aside that such dishes "are not much approved of in England" reads like what may be an inherited grumble from a French chef writing for English employers who would have preferred their turnips plainly boiled and buttered.