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Mashed Turnips
Select the large yellow turnips, as they are sweetest. The Cape Cod turnip is a good kind. Wash, pare and cut them into pieces. Boil them in salted boiling water until tender. Drain, mash, season with butter, pepper and salt, and heap lightly in a vegetable dish.-A. Lee.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment of the root modern shops label swede or rutabaga. The one thing that decides whether it works is moisture: turnip holds far more water than potato, and mash that is not dried out will slump into a puddle in the dish.
- "Large yellow turnips" means rutabagaThe big waxed purple-and-buff roots sold as rutabaga or swede are what this recipe wants; the small white-and-purple summer turnip is a different, sharper vegetable that cooks much faster. Rutabaga is sweeter and takes mashing better.
- Cape Cod turnipA name found in nineteenth-century American market and seed lists, apparently for a local yellow strain; it is not a name in general commercial use today. Any firm, heavy rutabaga with unshriveled skin substitutes directly.
- Peeling"Pare" here means taking off the skin and the tough fibrous layer just beneath it, which is thicker than a potato's. A sharp knife works better than a peeler on a large root; cut it into 1 to 1 1/2 inch chunks so the pieces cook evenly.
- TimingThe original gives none. Chunks of rutabaga need 25 to 35 minutes at a steady boil, considerably longer than potato, and are done when a knife slides through with no resistance at the center. Undercooked turnip mashes into stringy lumps that no amount of beating will smooth.
- Salt the water properlySalt the water -- Salt the boiling water as the recipe directs; about a tablespoon per 4 quarts is a reasonable starting point, and the recipe seasons again with salt after mashing.
- Dry it before mashingAfter draining, return the pieces to the empty hot pan over low heat for two or three minutes and let the steam escape, shaking now and then. Skip this and the mash will weep in the serving dish.
- Butter and textureFigure 2 to 3 tablespoons butter per 2 pounds of prepared turnip. A ricer or a hand masher gives the right coarse texture; a food processor tends to reduce it to a slack, wet puree. White pepper keeps the color clean if that matters to you.
- YieldA 2 pound rutabaga trims down to roughly 1 1/2 pounds and serves four as a side dish. "Heap lightly" means piling it without packing or smoothing.
Rutabaga reached American kitchens as a field crop, grown chiefly for cattle, and it kept a faint whiff of the barn about it well into the twentieth century; cookbooks of this period argue quietly for it by insisting on the sweetness of the yellow sorts and naming a respectable regional strain, as this recipe does with the Cape Cod turnip. Nineteenth-century seed catalogues and market lists are full of such place-names, since varieties were still local property rather than national brands. Of the recipe's origins nothing more can be said than what it carries on its face: the signature "A. Lee," and an entry brief enough to assume that boiling a vegetable needed no explanation, only the advice of which turnip to buy.