Home › Soups › Purée de Navets
Purée de Navets
Ingredients.
Twelve large Turnips.
Five ounces of Butter.
One ounce of Castor Sugar.
Two quarts of White Stock.
Half a pint of Cream.
A little grated Nutmeg.
Peel and slice the turnips, put them into a stewpan with four ounces of butter and one ounce of castor sugar and drawn down, taking care that they do not get brown; then add the stock and simmer gently for three-quarters of an hour; strain this, and rub the turnips through a hairsieve. Boil up the stock and skim it well, add the passed turnips, the cream, and an ounce of butter; stir all well together, boil up once and serve.
A classic French turnip velouté, thickened by nothing but the vegetable itself. The technique hinges on sweating the turnips without colour, which is what keeps the finished soup pale and sweet rather than muddy.
- "Drawn down"This is the old kitchen term for sweating: cook the sliced turnips in the butter over low heat, covered, with a scrap of paper or a lid pressed down on them, until soft and translucent. Any browning at this stage turns the purée grey-beige and gives it a caramel note the dish does not want.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar. It is here to balance the mustard-oil bitterness of the turnip, not to sweeten the soup, and an ounce across twelve turnips is roughly two tablespoons. Granulated works equally well since it dissolves in the pan.
- British measuresThe half pint of cream is an imperial half pint, 10 fl oz or about 1¼ US cups. Two quarts of stock is an imperial two quarts, about 2.3 litres. Twelve large turnips is a great deal of turnip; if you are using the small purple-topped kind, allow more of them.
- White stockA pale, unroasted veal or chicken stock, unseasoned and without tomato or browned bones. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will overwhelm the turnip.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve, of the kind preferred for pale purées; the usual explanation is that metal could discolour them. A food mill on the fine plate, or a blender followed by a pass through a chinois, gives the same result faster. Blending alone leaves a slight fibrousness in older turnips.
- The nutmegIt appears in the ingredient list and is then forgotten in the method, which happens often in books of this period. Grate it in at the end with the cream, sparingly — a few rasps for two quarts.
- FinishingOnce the cream and last ounce of butter go in, take the soup to a bare boil and no further. Held at a rolling boil the cream will separate and the butter will break out in beads on the surface.
- YieldTwo quarts of stock plus the purée gives roughly ten to twelve servings as a first course. Season with salt at the very end; the sugar shifts how much you need.
Turnip soups run through nineteenth-century French cookery under the name purée de navets or, simply, Freneuse — a name generally traced to the market-garden district of Freneuse in the Seine valley, long known for its turnips. Books of this class, aimed at cooks in large private houses and at the professional schools that trained them, carried whole banks of vegetable purée soups in the Soups chapter: each one the same architecture of sweated vegetable, white stock, sieve and cream, differing only in what went into the stewpan first. The turnip's reputation as a poor man's root is exactly why the butter, sugar and cream are so lavish here; the point of the dish in a late-Victorian kitchen was to demonstrate that the humblest vegetable could be made to taste of the dining room rather than the kitchen garden.