Turnips
Boil and mash through a colander. Season with a cup cream, spoonful butter, pepper, and salt, and stew quite dry. Then you may bake them.--Mrs. Col. W.
A terse nineteenth-century vegetable side that depends almost entirely on driving off water. Read it as mashed turnips enriched with cream and butter, then optionally browned in the oven.
- The hinge: cook it dryTurnips hold a great deal of water, and the instruction to "stew quite dry" is the whole recipe. After mashing and adding the cream, keep the pan over low heat and stir until the purée mounds on the spoon rather than slumping; otherwise the cream separates into a grey pool.
- "A cup cream"Eight fluid ounces. The recipe gives no quantity of turnips, so the proportion has to be judged by eye; against a couple of pounds of root it is generous by modern taste. Start with half and add the rest as the mash tightens.
- "Spoonful butter"Ambiguous in the original; period "spoonful" is not a fixed measure. A tablespoon suits the quantity of cream here.
- Push through a colanderOne of several period ways to purée a boiled root; a ricer or food mill gives the same texture. A food processor is best avoided, as it breaks the flesh down to a slack purée.
- BakingNo temperature is given because none could be. If you finish it in the oven, 375-400F for 20-30 minutes in a buttered dish will set the top and colour it; a scatter of breadcrumbs helps.
- Which turnip"Turnips" unqualified in a book of this period most likely means the white turnip rather than rutabaga, which period sources usually name separately. Rutabaga works but is sweeter, denser and needs longer boiling.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity or yield. Salt the boiling water well; unsalted turnip absorbs seasoning poorly once mashed.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is a collection of contributions from Virginia housekeepers, which is why this recipe ends with an attribution rather than a byline. Who "Mrs. Col. W." was cannot be established from the initial and rank alone. Turnips were a workhorse crop in the upper South, sown as a late-summer succession crop and stored in cellars or straw-covered pits through winter, and they appear in such books far more often than in modern ones. The treatment here, boiled and mashed and then enriched with cream and butter, is a familiar genteel way of redeeming a plain root vegetable, and the optional baking follows the same logic as a scalloped or baked dish of potatoes or squash: a browned top turns a homely mash into something that can be sent to table in its own dish.