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Some Kitchen Kinks: Turnips
Turnips. This vegetable is generally spoiled by overcooking. The flat, white summer turnip, when sliced, will cook in thirty minutes. If the cooking is prolonged beyond this time, the vegetable begins to deteriorate, growing dark in color and strong in flavor. The winter turnips require from forty-five to sixty minutes.
Boiled Turnips. a Have the turnips peeled and sliced. Drop the slices into stewpan with boiling water enough to cover generously. Cook until tender, then drain well. They are now ready to mash or chop. If they are to be served mashed, put them back in the stewpan; mash with a wooden vegetable masher, as metal is apt to impart an unpleasant taste.
Season with salt, butter, and a little pepper. Serve at once.
Hashed Turnips.
Chop the drained turnips into rather large pieces. Return to the stewpan, and for a pint and a half of turnips add a teaspoonful of salt, one-fourth of a teaspoonful of pepper, a tablespoonful of butter, and four tablespoonfuls of water. Cook over a very hot fire until the turnips have absorbed all the seasonings. Serve APPENDIX at once. Or the salt, pepper, butter, and a tablespoonful of flour may be added to the hashed turnips; then the stewpan may be placed over the hot fire and shaken frequently to toss up the turnips. When the turnips have been cooking five minutes in this manner add half a pint of meat stock or of milk and cook ten minutes.
A straightforward vegetable page whose real subject is timing. Two finished dishes come out of the same pot of boiled turnip: mashed, or hashed with butter and stock.
- The hinge: stop earlyThe warning about overcooking is sound, but the times given are generous even for their day. Sliced summer turnip is tender in 10 to 15 minutes; winter turnip cut to the same thickness rarely needs more than 20 to 25. Test with a knife tip rather than a clock, and drain the moment it gives.
- Summer versus winter turnipThe "flat, white summer turnip" is a small, flat-rooted white variety pulled young, not a globe storage type. "Winter turnips" here means storage roots, larger and denser; period American usage of "turnip" was loose and could take in the rutabaga (swede), which is yellow-fleshed and does need longer.
- Drain hard, then dryTurnip holds a great deal of water, and mashed turnip that weeps is the usual failure. After draining, return the pieces to the dry pan over low heat for a minute or two to drive off steam before mashing or seasoning.
- The wooden masherThe objection to metal probably reflects the era's tinned iron and unlined copper wares, which could taint acidic and sulphurous vegetables. Stainless steel or a ricer is fine now; a food processor tends to reduce turnip to a watery purée.
- "A very hot fire"High heat on a burner, uncovered. In the hashed version the four tablespoons of water are there only to carry the salt and butter through the turnip before boiling away, so it goes quickly and wants watching.
- The flour variationThis is a rough pan sauce built in place. A tablespoon of flour to half a pint (one cup) of stock or milk gives a light coating, not a gravy. Shake rather than stir so the pieces stay whole, and let the flour cook the full five minutes before the liquid goes in or it will taste raw.
- QuantitiesA pint and a half of chopped turnip is about three cups, roughly a pound of trimmed root. That serves three or four as a side dish.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for three cups is on the assertive side by modern habit, though turnip absorbs salt well. A little sugar or a spoonful of cream is a common later addition to blunt the mustard-family sharpness of older roots.
Turnips were the workhorse root of the northern kitchen long before the potato displaced them, cheap, storable through winter in a cellar or clamp, and reliable enough that they carried a faint stigma as poor man's food by the time this book was written. That reputation is largely a matter of handling: the sulphur compounds that give brassica roots their bite are volatile, and prolonged boiling is often said to shift their balance for the worse, which is broadly the deterioration the writer describes as growing "dark in color and strong in flavor." The caution against a metal masher belongs to the same era's general anxiety about cookware, when tinned and unlined pans were common and cooks worried about which vessels would taint which foods. It appears in a section of "kitchen kinks" rather than among formal receipts, though it gives two named dishes with full measured quantities and methods, aimed at cooks who had been boiling turnips into grey mush out of habit.