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Turnips in White Sauce
Peel some small turnips, as nearly as possible the same size, boil them in milk and water till tender; drain and cover with white sauce in which a table-spoonful of grated cheese has been mixed. Sprinkle a little minced parsley over, and serve.
A short Victorian side dish that depends almost entirely on the turnips themselves: small, young, evenly sized roots, cooked only to tenderness. The instructions leave out quantities and the sauce, so both need filling in.
- The hinge: don't overcookSmall turnips are tender in 12-20 minutes depending on size; a skewer should meet only slight resistance. Boiled to collapse they turn watery and sulphurous, and no amount of sauce will disguise it.
- Which turnipsThe recipe assumes young white or purple-top turnips the size of a golf ball or a little larger. Baby turnips can be left whole and unpeeled if the skin is thin; large winter swedes are a different vegetable and want quartering and longer cooking.
- Boiling in milk and waterHalf milk, half water, barely covering, with a good pinch of salt. The milk keeps the flesh pale and softens the mustardy edge; it will also catch on the pan base, so keep the heat at a bare simmer and stir once or twice.
- The white sauceA plain béchamel: 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour, ½ pint (about 1¼ cups) milk, cooked out for a few minutes so it does not taste of raw flour, seasoned with salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Some of the turnip cooking milk can be used as part of the liquid.
- The cheeseA tablespoon of hard grated cheese — Parmesan or a dry Cheddar — stirred into the finished sauce off the heat, so it melts without splitting. This is flavouring, not a cheese sauce; resist the urge to quadruple it.
- Drain thoroughlyTurnips hold water. Let them sit in the colander a minute or two, or return them briefly to the dry pan over low heat, or the sauce will thin out on the dish.
- Quantity and servingReckon about 1½ lb of turnips and the ½ pint of sauce for four as a side. Serve hot, in a warmed dish, alongside roast or boiled meat — mutton and boiled beef were the period's usual partners.
- If you want it brownedThe original is served plain and unbrowned. To make it a gratin, put the sauced turnips in a shallow dish, add more cheese on top and finish under a hot grill, adding the parsley after so it does not scorch.
Turnips were an everyday winter root of the British kitchen long before the potato displaced them, and cookery books of the period commonly give them a run of variations — mashed, glazed, stewed in gravy, and dressed in white sauce as here. A plain flour-and-butter white sauce of this kind was a general-purpose dressing, used with vegetables, fish and boiled fowl alike, and the spoonful of grated cheese lifts it without turning it into a sauce Mornay proper. Boiling pale roots in milk and water was recommended in this period to keep them from discolouring.