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To Stew Salsify
Scrape and throw at once in water to prevent from turning dark. Boil till tender in a closely covered vessel. Drain off the water and cut the salsify in pieces half an inch long. Throw in a saucepan with 1 teacup vinegar. 1 teacup water. 1 tablespoonful sugar. 1 tablespoonful butter. Salt and pepper to taste.
Just before serving, add the yolk of an egg, beaten up and mixed with a little water. The seasoning above given is for one quart salsify.--Mrs. S. T. Another Way to Stew Salsify.
Prepare the salsify exactly as in the foregoing recipe. Boil till tender, drain and cut in pieces, half an inch long, and then stew in milk. Just before serving, add a tablespoonful of butter, rolled in a teaspoonful flour. Let it boil up once. Pepper and salt it, grate cracker over it and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
Two versions of the same root: one sharp and vinegary, thickened with egg yolk; one creamy and thickened with flour. The instructions assume you know salsify already, so a few things need spelling out.
- The hinge: do not boil after the yolk goes inThe recipe says only "just before serving," but a yolk slackened with water and stirred into a simmering pan will scramble. Take the pan off the boil first and warm only until the sauce thickens.
- Acidulate the waterThe recipe says only "water," but a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice in it helps: scraped salsify oxidises to a dull grey-brown quite quickly.
- What a teacup holdsNineteenth-century American teacups are not standardised; period equivalences run anywhere from about half a cup to three-quarters. Equal parts vinegar and water at that scale is a forthright sauce — start with a milder vinegar, or cut the vinegar with more water, and taste.
- A quart of salsifyThe recipe does not say whether the quart is measured raw or as cut pieces after boiling; either reading points to somewhere over a pound of roots once scraped and trimmed, enough for a side dish for several.
- Boiling timeScraped salsify in a covered pan takes about 25 to 40 minutes depending on thickness; test with a knife tip rather than the clock. Old roots that have gone woody at the core will never come tender.
- Grated crackerPlain unsalted soda or water crackers, grated fine — the period equivalent of dry breadcrumbs. Modern saltines work but add noticeable salt, so season the milk sauce lightly first.
- Beurre manié in the second versionA tablespoon of butter rolled in a teaspoon of flour is a thickener kneaded cold and stirred into the hot milk. One boil-up is enough to cook out the raw flour taste; longer and the milk will catch on the bottom of the pan.
- Finding the rootTrue salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is pale and tapering; black salsify or scorzonera (Scorzonera hispanica) is a different root sometimes sold in its place and can be treated much the same way in both recipes.
Salsify was known in American kitchens as the oyster plant, for a faint marine sweetness that nineteenth-century cooks took seriously enough to fry it in patties as mock oysters. It is often said to have been a fixture of the winter garden in the Upper South: sown in spring, left in the ground through frost, and dug as needed when little else green remained, which is why it turns up so often in Virginia household books alongside parsnips and salsify soups. The two treatments here show the standard fork in the road for a bland winter root — sharpen it with vinegar and sugar and bind with yolk, or drown it in milk and thicken with flour. Both belong to a broad family of "stewed vegetable" recipes that fell away in the twentieth century as salsify itself receded from American tables, tedious to scrape and slow to grow, though it is still catalogued. Mrs. S. T., like most contributors to Housekeeping in Old Virginia, is identified only by initials, the compiler Marion Cabell Tyree having gathered the book in 1878 from housekeepers in Virginia "and her sister states."