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Salsify En Casserole
I bundle salsify 1 pint (2 cups) white sauce 1 teaspoonful anchovy extract 1 teaspoonful lemon juice 1 tablespoonful butter Few browned bread crumbs Salt and pepper Scrape and wash the roots of the salsify and put it to boil in boiling salted water in which has been squeezed the juice of half a lemon; when tender, drain off the water and cut into half-inch lengths.
Season the sauce with the lemon juice, anchovy extract, salt, and pepper. Toss the salsify in the sauce, turn it into a fireproof dish, put the bread crumbs and the butter on the top, and bake for a quarter of an hour.
A straightforward gratin whose only real difficulty is the salsify itself, which discolours the moment it is scraped and takes longer to cook than most root vegetables.
- Acidulated water throughoutSalsify browns almost instantly on contact with air, and the cut roots also weep a sticky white latex. Drop each scraped root straight into cold water with lemon juice, and keep the lemon in the cooking water as directed.
- A bundle of salsifyGreengrocers sold it tied in bundles, though the weight was never standard; a little over a pound of trimmed root is about the right quantity for a pint of sauce.
- Cooking timeNo time is given for boiling. Thin roots take about 20 minutes, thick ones 35 or more; test with a knife tip rather than the clock, and cut into half-inch lengths only after draining.
- White sauceA pint here means 2 cups of plain béchamel: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk. Keep it on the loose side, as the salsify will not thin it further.
- Anchovy extractAnchovy essence was a bottled, strained anchovy liquor sold everywhere in Edwardian Britain. Anchovy paste in the same quantity works, as does a teaspoon of colatura or a single mashed salted anchovy fillet. Salt the sauce only after it goes in.
- The bakeNo temperature is given, only 'bake for a quarter of an hour', which is long enough to heat through and colour the crumbs but no more; a hot oven, around 400-425F, with everything already warm, is the sensible modern reading. If the top is still pale, finish it under the broiler.
- Fireproof dishAn earthenware or other ovenproof dish that could go from oven to table. Any shallow gratin dish serves; shallow is better than deep, since the crumb crust is the point.
- YieldServes four as a side dish, or three as a light supper with bread.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) was called the oyster plant on both sides of the Atlantic, a name often said to come from a faint marine sweetness in the cooked root: the anchovy extract here is pushing the vegetable towards the flavour it was already thought to resemble. The book belongs to the vogue for cooking and serving in the same earthenware vessel that swept British and American kitchens in the years before the First World War, when glazed casseroles were newly affordable. Salsify was a common enough winter root in market gardens then and is scarce now; the black-skinned scorzonera, sold in the same bundles, is treated identically.