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Turnips, Stewed in Gravy
Pare and wash the turnips, and cut them into small square pieces, or turn them to the shape of balls or pears. Put them into a saucepan, pour over them as much boiling gravy as will cover them, and add a little salt and pepper and a small lump of sugar. Let them simmer gently until they are tender. Put them in a hot dish, pour the gravy over them, and serve very hot. Time to stew, three-quarters of an hour or more, according to age. Probable cost, 6d. per bunch.
A plain braise that depends entirely on the quality of the gravy, since the turnips absorb it as they cook. The Victorian kitchen always had stock or meat gravy on hand; a modern cook has to make a decision about it.
- The gravy"Boiling gravy" here means the thin meat gravy or well-flavoured brown stock kept in any large Victorian kitchen, not a thickened flour gravy. Use a good beef or chicken stock, or roast drippings let down with stock; if it is thickened it will scorch on the bottom of the pan during the long simmer.
- Cut for even cookingThe hinge of the dish is uniformity. Whether cubed or "turned" into barrel or pear shapes with a small knife, every piece must be the same size or the small ones will collapse into the gravy before the large ones give way.
- TimingThe recipe's three-quarters of an hour is a minimum; it allows "more, according to age" for large, old, coarse-fleshed roots. Young turnips or the small purple-topped ones sold now may be tender in 20 to 25 minutes; test with a knife tip from 15 minutes on and stop while they still hold their shape.
- The lump of sugarNot a garnish but a corrective for the mustard-family bitterness of mature roots. The recipe calls for a single small lump for the whole dish, roughly a teaspoon; with sweet young turnips it can be left out.
- Reducing at the endThe turnips will release water and slacken the gravy. Lift them out when tender and boil the liquid down by a third before pouring it back, or the dish arrives at the table watery.
- Yield and cost"6d. per bunch" is a period price, not a measure. A bunch of turnips is roughly 1.5 to 2 lb, which serves four as a vegetable.
- ServingServe it as a side to roast or boiled mutton, beef or pork, which is what the gravy would have come from in the first place.
Turnips carried much of the weight of English vegetable cookery before the potato displaced them, and they remained cheap and universally available through the nineteenth century, as the sixpence-a-bunch note suggests. The root is watery and can be bitter, so it wants either draining hard or, as here, cooking in something flavourful enough to make up the deficit. Turning vegetables into balls or pear shapes is often said to be a borrowing from French practice, a way of dressing up a labourer's root for a middle-class table, and it also happens to solve the practical matter of even cooking. The instruction to add sugar is generally traced to the older, coarser field varieties then common, which are said to have been far more pungent than the small sweet turnips sold today.