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Cream of Salsify Soup
4 roots salsify 2 pints (4 cups) milk 1 teaspoonful onion juice 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) butter I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) flour 2 eggs Salt and pepper to taste A few chopped pistachio nuts Water 1/2 pint (I cup) cream Clean the salsify, throwing at once into cold water to prevent their turning dark. Put them into an earthenware dish with water to well cover and cook till very tender, then rub through a sieve.
Return to the casserole and add to the pulp two cupfuls of the milk, onion juice, chopped parsley, salt and pepper to season.
Have ready the remaining milk, thickened with the butter and the flour rubbed together, add to the salsify, and heat thoroughly.
Just before serving stir in the beaten yolks of the eggs mixed with the cream.
Pour into hot marmites. Have ready the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs, put a spoonful of the egg on the top of each marmite, and sprinkle over the chopped pistachio nuts.
Serve hot.
A Victorian-era cream soup built on a vegetable that has largely left the market. The technique is straightforward; most of the work is in handling the salsify and in not letting the egg liaison curdle.
- The hinge: the yolk-and-cream liaisonOnce the beaten yolks and cream go in, the soup must not boil or even approach a simmer, or the yolks will scramble into threads. Take the pot off the heat, temper a ladleful of hot soup into the yolk mixture first, then stir it back in and serve at once.
- Salsify, and what to buySalsify (Tragopogon porrifolius, sold as oyster plant) has slim, pale, tapering roots; the black-skinned scorzonera sold alongside it can be used much the same way. Four roots is vague — probably somewhere around three-quarters of a pound to a pound once trimmed.
- Why the cold waterCut salsify oxidises to grey-brown within minutes. Acidulate the holding water with a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice, and peel under running water if the sticky white latex bothers you.
- "Casserole" and "earthenware dish"The recipe cooks in an earthenware dish and then returns the pulp to "the casserole," so the same lidded pot on the stovetop appears to be meant rather than a baked dish. Any heavy saucepan does the job.
- MarmitesSmall individual lidded pots of glazed earthenware, roughly a cup each. Warmed soup bowls or ovenproof ramekins serve the same purpose — the point is that the vessel is hot, since the soup cannot be reheated after the yolks go in.
- SievingRubbing the boiled root through a sieve was the usual route to smoothness before mechanical help. A blender or stick blender gives a finer result in seconds; pass it through a fine sieve afterwards if the fibrous cores leave strings.
- The raw egg-white garnishThe spoonful of stiff white floats on hot soup and is barely warmed through, so it stays essentially raw. Anyone cooking for children, the elderly or pregnant guests should use pasteurised whites or leave the garnish off; the soup loses nothing but height.
- PistachiosUse unsalted, blanched pistachios and chop them fine; roasted salted ones will overwhelm the very mild salsify.
- YieldFour to six small servings — a first course, not a main. Season assertively at the end; salsify is delicate and the cream flattens salt.
Salsify was a fixture of the nineteenth-century kitchen garden and a rarity in the twentieth-century supermarket, which is why a soup like this reads as exotic now and read as thrifty then. Its English nickname, oyster plant, is traditionally explained by a supposed resemblance to oysters; mock oyster fritters made from salsify appear in American and British cookbooks throughout the period. The finish with egg yolks and cream is a straight borrowing of the classical liaison, and the pistachio garnish the kind of small extravagance that turned a root-vegetable pur emovremoved e emoved emovedm emovedmoved emoved emovedmoved a course fit for company.