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Turnips, with White Sauce
Prepare the turnips and stew them in gravy, and when they are quite tender lift them out without breaking them, drain them, and put them in a tureen. Have a tea-spoonful of arrowroot already mixed smoothly with a quarter of a pint of cream or milk. Mix the gravy gradually with this, put it back into the saucepan, and let it boil. Take it from the fire for a few minutes, stir half an ounce of cold butter into it: when this is dissolved pour the sauce over the turnips, and serve very hot. Time to stew the turnips, three-quarters of an hour or more, according to age and size. Probable cost, turnips, 5d. to 7d. per bunch. Sufficient, half a bunch of turnips for four or five persons.
A velouté-style vegetable dish that depends on two things: not overcooking the turnips, and not boiling the sauce once the butter goes in.
- The hinge: butter off the heatThe arrowroot-thickened gravy is boiled first, then pulled from the fire before the cold butter is stirred in. If the pan is still at a boil the emulsion breaks and the sauce turns greasy rather than glossy.
- "Gravy" here means stock"Gravy" here most likely means stock -- in Victorian cookery books gravy commonly denotes a light meat broth rather than the thickened pan sauce of a modern roast. The recipe gives no quantity; use enough unthickened veal, chicken or beef stock to barely cover the turnips as they stew.
- Quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter pint is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. Half an ounce of butter is a tablespoon; a teaspoon of arrowroot is a light thickening, giving a pouring sauce rather than a coating one.
- Timing is for old turnipsTiming depends on age and size -- the recipe says three-quarters of an hour "or more, according to age and size", so 45 minutes is the minimum, with longer for larger or older roots. Trimmed young turnips cut in quarters or thick rounds are tender in 15 to 25 minutes. Test with a skewer and stop there -- the recipe's insistence on lifting them out unbroken depends on it.
- Arrowroot behaves unlike flourIt thickens almost at once, clears as it cooks, and thins again if held at a boil or reheated. Bring it just to the boil and use the sauce immediately; it will not sit on the stove like a flour-based one.
- Slake it coldMix the arrowroot into the cold cream or milk until smooth, then add the hot gravy to it gradually rather than the reverse. Tipping cream straight into a hot pan of stock invites curdling as well as lumps.
- The tureenA covered serving dish, warmed. Its purpose is to hold the drained turnips hot while the sauce is finished — a warmed bowl covered with foil does the same work.
- YieldHalf a bunch serves four or five as a side, which reads as roughly 1 to 1.5 lb of prepared turnip. Season the sauce at the end; stock-stewed turnips take salt and white pepper well, and a scrape of nutmeg is period-appropriate.
Turnips were the workhorse root of the British kitchen garden long before the potato displaced them, cheap enough that Cassell's quotes them by the bunch in pence and treats them as an everyday vegetable rather than a delicacy. Dressing them in a white sauce enriched with cream, arrowroot and butter is the standard Victorian strategy for lifting a plain root to the dinner table, and it sits in the book beside similar treatments of other vegetables. Arrowroot, imported from the West Indies, was long valued as a lighter, more digestible thickener than flour — it was widely recommended for invalid cookery, and its use here produces a clear, glossy sauce that does not mask the vegetable. Stewing the turnips in meat gravy rather than water reflects the older practice of cooking vegetables in the liquor of the joint they were meant to accompany, traditionally said to be boiled mutton.