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Vegetables: Blanching
Blanching means bleaching; it removes from winter vegetables their strong, acrid flavor. Then it improves their quality. Let us blanch turnips, for instance; then you can apply the same process to a variety of vegetables. Have a large saucepan with 2 quarts water at a rapid boil; add 1 tablespoonful salt; drop into it the pared turnips and bring the water back to the boiling point as quickly as possible. Cook rapidly, uncovered, for thirty minutes. Drain off the water, put the turnips in a strainer, and MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK cool them under the cold-water faucet; then set away in a covered dish until you are ready to prepare them for the table. Cut them into rather large pieces, put in a saucepan with a tablespoonful butter, a dash pepper, a teaspoonful salt, and 4 tablespoonfuls meat stock or milk. Cook over a hot fire until the vegetables have absorbed both seasonings and liquid. Serve at once.
A two-stage method: boil the vegetable hard in salted water, chill it, then finish it in butter and a little liquid at the last minute. It reads oddly today because "blanching" has since narrowed to mean a brief dip, but the technique itself is sound and still worth using for strong winter roots.
- The hinge: two separate cookingsThe point is that the first boil is thrown away along with the water, carrying the acrid sulfur compounds with it. If you finish the turnips in the same pot or reuse the cooking liquid, the whole exercise is pointless.
- Thirty minutes is for old storage turnipsCellar-kept winter turnips in February were dense and bitter. Supermarket turnips, and certainly young purple-tops or hakurei, are tender in 10 to 15 minutes. Test with a knife tip rather than watching the clock.
- "Blanch" here does not mean the modern 60-second dipThe word is used in its older sense, from the French blanchir, meaning to whiten and to purge. Modern blanching for freezing or for setting the color of green vegetables is a different, much shorter operation.
- Uncovered, and at a rolling boilBoth instructions matter. An open pot lets volatile sulfur compounds escape rather than condensing back into the water, and a hard boil keeps the pieces moving so they cook evenly.
- Salt ratioA tablespoon to two quarts is about 1 percent salinity, which is a reasonable seasoning level and can be kept as written.
- The cold-water rinseRunning them cold stops the cooking and firms the surface so the pieces do not collapse when reheated. Drain them well; wet turnips will steam rather than glaze in the finishing pan.
- The finish is a glazeButter, seasoning and four tablespoons of stock or milk over high heat until the liquid is gone. Stock gives a savory glaze; milk gives something closer to a creamed vegetable and will catch and brown if you walk away from it.
- What else this works onThe same treatment suits rutabaga, older parsnips, cabbage and Brussels sprouts, and bitter greens such as dandelion or broccoli rabe. It is unnecessary for carrots, potatoes or anything sweet and mild.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight of turnips and no serving count. Two quarts of water will comfortably handle a pared turnip or two; judge the finishing butter and liquid against the amount you actually cook.
Before refrigeration, root vegetables spent the winter in a cellar or a clamp, and by late winter turnips and rutabagas had often grown woody and distinctly sulfurous. Purging them in a first water was a common household practice on both sides of the Atlantic, and cookbooks of the period apply the same logic to cabbage, greens and salt meat. Getting the long, smelly cooking done well before dinner, then finishing at the last minute, suited a kitchen with a coal or wood range. The words MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK landing mid-sentence are a running page header caught in the transcription.