Home › Vegetables › Vegetables: White
Vegetables: White
Carrots with White Sauce.
Scrape carrots lightly, then cut into large dice. Put in a stewpan with salted water and boil until tender.
Young carrots will cook in thirty minutes, old ones in forty-five. Drain, put back in the stewpan, and for every pint add 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 teaspoonful sugar, ½ teaspoonful salt, and 1 gill meat stock. Cook until they have absorbed the seasonings and liquid.
Salsify.
To prevent salsify from turning dark, drop it as soon as pared and cut into a mixture of flour and water made slightly acid with vinegar. Cook thirty minutes, drain, and serve in a white sauce. Or mix 1 tablespoonful butter, ½ teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful lemon juice, and 1 teaspoonful minced parsley. Add this to the drained salsify, and serve at once.
Beets with Butter.
Wash beets, being careful not to break the skins. Put in a stewpan, cover with boiling water, and boil until tender. Young beets will cook in one hour. When tender, take from the boiling water and drop into cold water. Rub off the skins. Cut in thin slices and season with salt and butter. Serve at once.
Boiled Kohl-Rabi.
Wash and pare the vegetable, then cut in thin slices. Put in salted boiling water and boil until the vegetable is tender. This will take from thirty to fifty minutes. Pour off the water, and season with butter, salt, and pepper.
Four plain vegetable preparations from a period when "white vegetables" meant anything finished with butter or a white sauce rather than browned. The measurements are sound; the timings belong to older, coarser produce.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. "For every pint" appears to mean a pint of the cooked diced carrot measured by volume.
- The white sauce is assumedNeither the carrots nor the salsify gives one; a book of this kind would have carried a standard white sauce elsewhere (typically 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it no longer tastes of raw flour). The carrot version here, despite its title, dispenses with sauce altogether and simply glazes in butter, sugar and stock.
- Carrot timingThirty to forty-five minutes assumes storage carrots grown for keeping. Modern diced carrots are tender in 8 to 12 minutes; boil them that long, drain, then add the butter, sugar, salt and stock and reduce over moderate heat until the liquid is a glaze, about 5 minutes more.
- The salsify bathFlour and water sharpened with vinegar is a blanc. The acid stops the cut surfaces oxidising and the flour keeps the roots pale and coats them against the air; salsify browns within a minute of paring, so have the bowl ready before the knife. Cooking in the same blanc, rather than plain water, keeps them whiter still.
- Salsify is scarceSold as salsify or scorzonera at farmers' markets in autumn and winter. Sliced thin it is done in 15 to 20 minutes, not thirty. Parsnip is the usual substitute, though it is sweeter and lacks the faint oyster note salsify is prized for.
- BeetsLeave an inch of stem and the tail root intact along with the skin; any break lets the colour bleed into the water and the beet cooks out pale. An hour suits small young beets, 90 minutes to 2 hours larger ones. The cold-water plunge cools them enough to handle and helps the loosened skins rub off under your thumbs.
- KohlrabiPare deeply. The outer layer is fibrous and stays woody however long it boils, and on a large bulb that can mean removing a quarter-inch. Thin slices of a young bulb need 10 to 15 minutes, not fifty.
- YieldThe recipes give no yield; reckoning about a pound of prepared vegetable, each would serve roughly four as a side dish.
These entries sit in a household compendium rather than a chef's book, and the vegetables are the keeping and kitchen-garden roots of the period: carrots and beets for storage, kohlrabi and salsify less commonly grown. Salsify was widely called the oyster plant, its flavour being likened to a mild oyster, and it appears frequently in nineteenth-century American and English cookery before falling largely out of commercial cultivation. Kohlrabi, a swollen-stemmed cabbage, is generally associated in America with German-speaking households and long carried a reputation as a fodder crop. The grouping under "white" reflects an older way of organising vegetable cookery by finish rather than by botany: boiled, drained, and dressed in butter or a flour-and-milk sauce, as opposed to fried, stewed brown, or baked.