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A Salad of Turnips
Scrape six common sized turnips. Add 2 cups of sugar. 1 or more cups vinegar. Mustard, celery-seed and pepper to taste. --Mrs. G. A. B.
A four-line contributor's note rather than a method: this is a sweet-sour raw turnip relish in the mould of a cold slaw, and it assumes the cook already knows what to do with a bowl of shredded root and a jug of vinegar.
- "Scrape" means shred"Scrape" -- in period recipes scraping a root usually means taking the skin off with a knife, though for a raw salad the turnips clearly have to be reduced to shreds as well. Peel the turnips, then grate them on the large holes of a box grater or shred them on a mandoline.
- Quantity"common sized" is left to the cook; reckon on ordinary market turnips of a few ounces each, so perhaps a couple of pounds in all and a large bowl of shreds. The dressing quantities scale down proportionally without trouble.
- The sugar is not a typo, but it is a period tasteTwo cups of sugar to six turnips produces something closer to a sweet pickle than a salad. Modern palates generally find a quarter to a third of that enough to balance the vinegar and the turnip's mustard-oil bite.
- Vinegar"1 or more cups" means enough to wet the shreds thoroughly and start drawing water out of them. Cider vinegar is the likeliest thing on a Virginia shelf; distilled white gives a sharper, flatter result.
- The missing saltNo salt is listed, but turnip shreds want it, and salting them for half an hour and then squeezing out the liquid keeps the finished salad from going watery in the bowl.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder, listed as it is beside celery-seed and pepper, rather than prepared table mustard. Start with a teaspoon; its sharpness comes up once wetted and then settles as the salad stands.
- Standing timeDress it at least an hour ahead and refrigerate. The shreds soften, the sugar dissolves and the celery seed perfumes the whole bowl. It keeps several days covered in the refrigerator and improves on the second day.
- ServingTreat it as a condiment portion rather than a side salad -- a few spoonfuls alongside pork, ham or cold meat, which is the company this sort of sweet-sour dish kept.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many of its entries end with a set of initials rather than a name and read like notes passed between neighbours who already knew the technique. This one belongs to the large family of sweet-sour raw vegetable dishes -- cold slaw, chow-chow, pickled relishes -- that carried households through the months when the garden offered little but roots and cabbage. Turnips stored well in a cellar or clamp and were plentiful and cheap, but their flavour is flat and slightly bitter raw; sugar, vinegar, mustard and celery seed were the standard corrective, the same seasoning grammar applied to cabbage, green tomatoes and cucumbers elsewhere in the book. The heavy hand with sugar is characteristic of the period rather than of this cook in particular.