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Turnips, Mashed
Wash and pare the turnips, and throw them into cold water as they are done. Drain, and throw them into a saucepan with slightly-salted boiling water. Keep them covered, and let them oil till tender. Drain them by placing them in a bowl and pressing a plate upon them to squeeze out the moisture. Mash well, and carefully remove any stringy portions there may be among them. If necessary, pass them through a colander or a wire sieve. Mix with them a little pepper and salt, a slice of butter, and a table-spoonful or two of cream or milk. Stir the pulp over the fire until it is hot and quite dry. Serve very hot. Time to boil, three-quarters of an hour to an hour and a half. Probable cost, 5d. to 7d. per bunch. Sufficient, one bunch for five or six persons.
A straightforward vegetable dish whose only real difficulty is water: turnips hold a great deal of it, and mashed turnip that has not been dried out will be soup.
- "Let them oil till tender"A printer's slip for "boil". The instruction is simply to keep the pan covered and boil until a knife meets no resistance.
- The boiling timeThree-quarters of an hour to an hour and a half is very long by modern standards and suggests whole or large roots rather than cut pieces. Ordinary supermarket turnips, peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks, are tender in 15 to 20 minutes; swede takes 25 to 30.
- The hinge: dryingThe press-under-a-plate step and the final stirring over heat are the whole recipe. Squeeze hard in a colander or clean towel, then stir the mash in a dry pan over medium heat until it stops steaming and pulls away from the sides. Skip this and no amount of butter will save it.
- Stringy portionsThese come from old or oversized roots and from the woody core near the crown. Trim the top inch generously when paring; if the mash still feels fibrous, the sieve is worth the trouble.
- "A slice of butter"A vague Victorian measure, probably somewhere around 1 to 2 tablespoons. On roughly a pound and a half of turnip, start at 2 tablespoons and add more once the pulp is dry, since butter goes further in a mash that is not waterlogged.
- Which turnipNineteenth-century books often used "turnip" loosely for both the small white turnip and the yellow swede, sold in the United States as rutabaga. Swede mashes sweeter and darker; which is meant here is not stated.
- A bunchTurnips were commonly sold in bunches with the tops still on. A bunch might be reckoned at a couple of pounds of trimmed root, which the original says serves five or six as a side dish. The greens need not be discarded; they cook like any other bitter leaf.
- CostFivepence to sevenpence a bunch was cheap by the standards of the book's other entries.
Mashed turnip belongs to the plainest layer of British cookery: a cheap, storable root that fed both people and livestock through winter, and which was often overcooked, so that its reputation never quite recovered. Cassell's places the recipe in the reference run of vegetable entries rather than treating it as a dish with a pedigree, and its instructions reflect a common nineteenth-century concern about watery vegetables, hence the plate pressed down on the drained roots and the insistence on stirring the pulp "quite dry". The swede, generally said to have reached Britain from northern Europe in the later eighteenth century and long associated with Scotland, where mashed neeps are eaten with haggis, would have been the winter form of this dish; the small white turnip served in spring and early summer. The addition of cream or milk and butter is the touch that lifts it from fodder to table food, much as with potato puree.