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TURNIPS, STEWED (a la Franoise)
Peel and wash half a dozen turnips, and boil them in salted water till tender. Take them up, drain them, and in the water in which they have been boiled simmer gently a cupful of bread-crumbs for five or six minutes. Wash the turnips, and put them into another saucepan with the boiled bread and a little butter and pepper. Stir over a gentle fire till they are quite hot, and mix with them the yolk of an egg beaten up with two table-spoonfuls of milk. Let them stew gently a minute or two longer, and serve very hot. Turnips prepared thus are very good as an accompaniment to boiled mutton, veal, or poultry. Time, three-quarters of an hour to an hour and a half to boil the turnips. Probable cost, 5d. to 7d. per bunch. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A bread-thickened turnip purée finished with an egg yolk — closer to a soft vegetable ragout than a mash. Two things in the text need untangling before you start.
- "Wash the turnips" is a misprintThe second instruction almost certainly reads mash in the intended text: the turnips have already been peeled, washed and boiled, and they are then combined with soft bread and butter. Mash or roughly crush them once drained.
- The egg yolk is the hingeOnce the yolk and milk go in, the mixture must not boil or it will curdle into grainy threads. Keep it below a simmer for the final minute or two, stirring, and serve at once.
- Boiling timeThree-quarters of an hour to an hour and a half is a long time; the recipe does not say whether the turnips are cut up, so it presumably has whole or large winter roots in mind. Cut into 1½-inch chunks, ordinary turnips are tender in about 15–20 minutes, swede 25–30. Test with a knife rather than watching the clock.
- Which turnipVictorian "turnips" sold by the bunch were usually small white-fleshed ones with tops attached. Swede (rutabaga) works and gives a sweeter, more orange result; young spring turnips need the shortest cooking and less mashing.
- Bread-crumbsUse crumbs from stale white bread, not dried packaged crumbs, which are too fine and absorb far more liquid. A cupful of soft crumbs simmered in the cooking water becomes a loose panada that binds the purée.
- Drain well, then drain againTurnips hold a great deal of water. Let them steam dry in the colander for a few minutes before mashing, or the finished dish will be soupy no matter how much bread goes in.
- SeasoningThe recipe asks only for pepper, the salt having come from the cooking water. Taste at the end — bread and butter mute salt, and a little grated nutmeg is period-appropriate with turnip and veal.
- Yield and costSix turnips serve five or six as a side dish. The "5d. to 7d. per bunch" is a late-Victorian price note and has no modern equivalent beyond telling you this was among the cheapest things on the table.
The title is an OCR-mangled à la Française, one of Cassell's many borrowed French tags for a treatment that is really an English one: root vegetables enriched with a panada of bread and bound with egg yolk. Bread was one of the working thickeners of the Victorian kitchen, and using the vegetable's own cooking water to soften it wasted nothing. The pairing suggested — boiled mutton, veal, poultry — places the dish squarely in the plain-boiled-joint tradition, where a mild, buttery vegetable stood in for a sauce. Turnips were among the cheapest vegetables available year-round in Britain, cellared through winter and sold in bunches with their greens.