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Creamed Oyster Plant
Boil the roots till tender, or take the remnants of dressed salsify, and divide them into inch lengths. Dissolve a slice of butter in a saucepan, and work into this as much flour as it will take. When the paste is quite smooth, and before it is at all colored, moisten with milk or cream, season with salt and cayenne, and stir it over the fire till it coats the spoon. Put in the slices of salsify, let them get hot, and dish in a pyramid form on a hot dish. Add a spoonful of lemon juice to the sauce, pour it over the roots, and garnish with fried sippets. Time altogether, one hour and a half.
A plain white sauce over boiled salsify, written for cooks who already had leftover "dressed" roots on hand. The only real difficulty is keeping the peeled roots from turning grey.
- Oyster plant is salsifyTragopogon porrifolius, a long tapering root sold in autumn and winter at farm markets and some greengrocers. The name is usually explained by a faint shellfish flavour in the cooked root. Black salsify (scorzonera) is a different plant but cooks much the same way and can be substituted.
- Peel into acid waterCut salsify oxidises within minutes and darkens the finished sauce. Drop the peeled, trimmed roots straight into cold water with a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of vinegar, and boil them in salted water with a little lemon juice added.
- The stated time is far too longThe stated time is for the whole operation -- An hour and a half covers peeling, boiling and saucing in a coal-range kitchen, not the boiling alone. Salsify cut into inch lengths is tender in 20 to 30 minutes; whole roots may take 40. Test with a knife tip and stop there, or the pieces collapse into the sauce.
- "A slice of butter"Read this as about 2 tablespoons, and "as much flour as it will take" as an equal volume, roughly 2 tablespoons. That plus a cup of milk or cream gives a sauce of the right coating consistency for about a pound of cooked root.
- Cook the roux, but keep it whiteThe instruction not to let it colour matters: two to three minutes over low heat is enough to lose the raw flour taste. Add the milk gradually and stir until it visibly films the back of a spoon.
- Lemon juice goes in last, off the heatLemon juice goes in last -- Acid stirred into a hot dairy sauce over direct heat can cause it to split. Take the pan off, stir the juice in, and pour at once.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter until crisp, arranged around the base of the mound. They are structural as much as decorative, since the dish is otherwise soft throughout.
- YieldA pound of salsify, once peeled and trimmed, serves three or four as a side dish.