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Turnips, White Puree Of
If you want to make a very white puree, you must mince the turnips, blanch them in boiling water, and drain and sweat them over a very slow fire in a little butter to prevent their getting brown. When they are done enough, add two or three spoonfuls of bchamel, strain them like a puree through a tamis, reduce, and serve surrounded with fried toasts of bread. If they are for entremets, the puree must be thicker; if for garnishing entrees, richer and more tasty.
A classical French method for turnip purée, written for cooks who already knew what béchamel and a tamis were. The whole point is whiteness, which means keeping the turnips from taking any colour at any stage.
- The hinge: no colour"Sweat" here means cooking covered in butter over the lowest possible heat until the turnip is soft but has not browned at all. A heavy pan, a lid, and a piece of parchment pressed onto the surface will hold in steam and keep the edges pale.
- Blanching is not optionalBlanching — Turnips can carry a sulphurous bitterness that is generally said to intensify with age and storage. A few minutes in fast-boiling water, then a thorough drain, is held to reduce it; the recipe makes the step part of the method.
- TamisA tamis is a drum sieve — a flat mesh screen you scrape the purée through with a plastic scraper or the back of a ladle. A fine-mesh conical sieve does the same job. Do not use a food processor on cooked turnip: the blades make it slack and watery rather than smooth.
- Béchamel"Two or three spoonfuls" means a thick, well-cooked white sauce, not milk. Make a small quantity with equal butter and flour cooked without colouring, and let it simmer long enough to lose the raw flour taste before it goes in.
- ReduceAfter sieving, the purée goes back over heat and is stirred until it stiffens. Turnips are around ninety per cent water, so this stage is what separates a purée from a soup. Stir constantly on moderate heat; it catches easily once thick.
- Two consistenciesFor an entremets (here a vegetable dish served in its own right) reduce until a spoon drawn through leaves a clean track. For garnishing entrées, finish with extra butter and cream so it stays glossy and spoonable beside the meat.
- Fried toastsCroûtons cut into triangles or hearts, fried in clarified butter until pale gold and drained. Cut them thin, and fry them at the last moment so they are still crisp when the plate reaches the table.
- QuantityThe original gives none. Roughly 2 lb of peeled turnips and 2 oz butter will make four side portions; keep the béchamel to the two or three spoonfuls the recipe specifies and add more only if the purée refuses to come together.
Purées of this kind belong to the systematic French kitchen of the nineteenth century, where every vegetable had its named preparation and the mark of skill was controlling colour as much as flavour. The method it teaches — blanch, sweat, bind, sieve, reduce — transfers to celeriac, cauliflower, artichoke bottoms or anything else meant to arrive at the table white. Turnips were cheap and abundant in Britain, so a French-trained treatment of them was a way of showing that technique, not expense, made the difference. The instruction to adjust thickness depending on whether the dish stands alone or garnishes an entrée reflects the multi-course menu structure of the period, in which the same preparation might appear in several roles across a long meal.