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Turnips, for Garnish
Very effective-looking flowers for garnishing cold dishes such as roast turkeys, tongues, etc., may be made with turnips. Skill in making these can only be acquired by practice, and in order to attain it the best plan would be to procure a small sound turnip, a sharp penknife, a little liquid cochineal, a paint brush, and a real camellia, or any other suitable flower, as a pattern. Cut and shape the turnip, and endeavour to imitate the real flower as closely as possible. Paint the edges of the leaves a rosy tint with the cochineal, push in a little piece of stick for a stalk, and fasten two or three bay-leaves round the flower.
This is a carving exercise rather than a cooked dish, and it belongs to the Victorian cold table. A few points make the difference between a convincing camellia and a chewed-looking root vegetable.
- The hinge: work from a real flowerThe instruction to keep a camellia or similar bloom in front of you is the whole technique. Turnip petals cut from memory come out as uniform scallops; copying a real flower forces the overlapping, uneven layers that read as a flower from across a table.
- Choose the turnip carefullyA small, firm white turnip with dense flesh and no woody core or hollow centre. Old storage turnips are fibrous and split along the grain as soon as you thin a petal.
- CochinealLiquid cochineal was a carmine solution made from dried scale insects, sold by grocers and chemists as a food colour. Any modern liquid or gel red food colouring does the same job; carmine itself is still sold as E120 or natural red 4, and is worth avoiding if anyone at the table avoids insect-derived ingredients.
- Water is the missing stepCut turnip dries out and greys within an hour. Hold the finished flowers in ice water until you plate them, which also makes thin petals curl and open. Colour the edges after they have drained, or the tint bleeds.
Carved-vegetable flowers belong to the Victorian cold buffet, the branch of professional cookery that later took the name garde-manger. A house serving a cold turkey, a pressed tongue or a galantine on a mirror or a napkin-draped dish was expected to dress it: aspic croutons, cut lemon, bay leaves and turnip roses were part of the standard vocabulary of such presentation work, which is generally traced back to the elaborate table arrangements of Careme and his successors in the great kitchens. Cochineal, made from dried Dactylopius insects imported chiefly from the Canaries and Mexico, was a common household red of the period and turns up in books of this date for tinting icing, jellies and blancmange as well as garnishes. The admission that skill "can only be acquired by practice" is a fair warning: this is a knife exercise, not a cooked dish.