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Turnips, Glazed, with White or Brown Sauce
Take five or six small, sound, white turnips. Peel and wash them, and turn them to the size and shape of toy-marbles. Dissolve two ounces of fresh butter in a deep pan, and sprinkle an ounce of pounded sugar into it. Put in the turnips, and fry till they are covered with glaze. Pour over them a quarter of a pint of good white or brown sauce, and let them simmer gently until tender. Season with pepper and salt. Arrange the turnips in a dish, pour the sauce over, and serve very hot.
A straightforward glazed root, but the sugar is doing real work here and it is the thing most likely to go wrong. Watch the pan rather than the clock.
- The hinge: keep the heat moderateTwo ounces of butter and one of sugar will caramelise and then burn quickly over high heat, and burnt sugar makes the whole dish bitter. Keep the pan at a gentle sizzle and turn the turnips until they take on a pale amber gloss, roughly 8-10 minutes.
- "Turn them to the size and shape of toy-marbles"Turning means paring each piece into a smooth ball with a small knife. There will be a good deal of trim, which is worth keeping for soup or mash. A melon baller gives a similar result faster, though the surfaces glaze less evenly.
- Pounded sugarLoaf sugar crushed fine, roughly comparable to caster sugar. Granulated works; it simply takes a moment longer to dissolve in the butter.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 140 ml or a generous half cup. It should barely cover the turnips.
- White or brown sauceThe white would be a milk- or stock-based white sauce, the brown one built on browned roux and meat stock. A well-reduced chicken or beef stock, lightly thickened, serves the same purpose without making a separate mother sauce.
- Deep panA sauté pan or shallow saucepan wide enough to hold the turnips in one layer. Crowded, they steam instead of glazing.
- TendernessSmall young turnips need 12-15 minutes of gentle simmering after the sauce goes in; test with a knife tip rather than trusting a time. If the sauce reduces too far before they are done, add a spoonful of water.
- YieldFive or six small turnips, once turned, give a side dish for two or three people.
Glazing root vegetables in butter and sugar is a French kitchen technique, and its presence in a British household dictionary of the later nineteenth century reflects how far the vocabulary of the professional French kitchen had entered middle-class English cookery. The instruction to "turn" the turnips to uniform marbles is restaurant discipline: it costs a good deal of the vegetable but means every piece cooks at the same rate and takes the same shine. Turnips were among the cheapest and most abundant winter roots in Britain, long associated with fodder and plain boiling, so dressing them with butter, sugar and a made sauce was a way of promoting a humble ingredient to the company table. The same butter-and-sugar glaze was commonly applied to other roots and to small onions.