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Peas in Turnip Cups
Steam small white turnips, hollow out the centers, cut the edges in points.
Fill with peas which have been heated in a sauce made of two tablespoons of butter cooked with two tablespoons of flour, one cup of milk and one-fourth teaspoon of salt. Serve hot. See Page XVII.
A garnish-minded vegetable dish from the era when a plain side dish was expected to arrive shaped. The cooking is simple; the fussing is the point.
- Turnip size"Small white turnips" means young roots about 2 inches across, roughly golf-ball size, four to six per pound. Large storage turnips are too coarse and too strong-tasting, and their walls will not hold a neat cup.
- Steaming timeWhole small turnips need 15 to 20 minutes over boiling water until a skewer meets slight resistance at the center. Fully soft turnips collapse when hollowed. Peel before steaming, or the skin will tear as you scoop.
- Hollowing and pointingScoop with a melon baller or a teaspoon, leaving walls about a quarter inch thick. Cut the rim into points with the tip of a paring knife, angling the cuts inward so the peaks stay upright. Save the scooped flesh; it mashes into the sauce or a soup.
- The sauce is a plain white sauceTwo tablespoons each butter and flour to one cup milk is a medium bechamel. Cook the roux two minutes without browning, add the milk gradually off the heat, then simmer three to four minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- PeasThe book assumes peas already cooked, or canned peas of the period. Frozen peas need only two to three minutes warmed through in the finished sauce; longer and they turn olive-drab and mealy.
- SeasoningA quarter teaspoon of salt for a cup of milk is restrained by current taste. Season the sauce to your own preference and add white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg if you want it to read as more than filler.
- Yield and holdingThe book gives no yield; a cup of sauce with peas to match will fill about six small turnip cups, enough for six as a side. Steam the turnips ahead and reheat them covered in a low oven; fill only at the last minute or the cups weep and the sauce thins.
Vegetables served inside other vegetables belong to the presentation logic of late-Victorian and early twentieth-century American cookery, when the influence of French service filtered into domestic kitchens and turned everyday sides into small architectural exercises. Hollowed turnips, tomatoes, onions and green pepper halves all appear as edible containers in books of the period, and such recipes are often accompanied by a cross-reference elsewhere in the volume. The white turnip itself was a staple winter root in the northern states, cheap and abundant from fall storage, and dressing it up with a cream sauce and peas was one way to make a humble keeping vegetable presentable at a company table. The sauce is the era's universal one — butter, flour, milk in equal-spoon proportions.