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Turnips Au Gratin
1 pint (2 cups) white sauce 4 heaping tablespoonfuls grated cheese I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) butter Salt and pepper Wash and peel the turnips, soak them in cold salted water for ten minutes. Drain, and cook the turnips in boiling salted water till half cooked.
Drain and cut in slices. Butter a gratin dish; arrange the slices on it in a heap. Heat the sauce, add two tablespoonfuls of the cheese to it; season the turnips with salt and pepper, pour the sauce over, and sprinkle the rest of the grated cheese over the top; put a few pieces of butter here and there, and cook in a hot oven till a light brown color.
A straightforward gratin, though the ingredient list omits the turnips themselves and the oven is given only as "hot." A few numbers make it repeatable.
- Quantity of turnipsThe list gives sauce, cheese and butter but never says how many turnips. Two cups of white sauce will coat something on the order of 2 lb of peeled turnips, enough for four to six.
- A hot ovenRead this as somewhere in the 400-450F range. The turnips go in only half cooked, so the oven has to finish them as well as brown the top and bring the sauce to a bubble; allow longer than a simple browning would need.
- The white sauceA pint of plain white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk gives a thin pouring sauce; double the butter and flour if you want it to cling. Cook until the flour loses its raw taste, and season before the cheese goes in, since cheeses vary in saltiness.
- The cheeseThe recipe does not specify a cheese; a dry hard one such as Parmesan or a well-aged Cheddar suits the dish. Four heaping tablespoons is roughly an ounce grated; add the two tablespoons off the heat so the sauce does not break.
- Half cooked, then slicedThis is the hinge. Turnips boiled to tenderness before they go in the dish will collapse into mush under the sauce. Take them out while a knife still meets resistance at the center, roughly 8 to 10 minutes for whole small turnips, then slice.
- The cold salt soakTen minutes in cold salted water is the recipe's own step; it may firm the flesh a little, though how much a soak that short does for the sharpness of a brassica root is open to question. Older, larger turnips are the ones worth the trouble.
- Arrange in a heapMeant literally: the slices are piled rather than laid flat, which means the sauce must be poured slowly so it works down through the pile.
- ServingBest straight from the dish while the top is still crisp; like most flour-thickened gratins it is likely to suffer on reheating.
Turnips were the workhorse root of the English and American winter kitchen long before potatoes displaced them, cheap enough to feed livestock and plain enough that cooks worked hard at dressing them up. Coating them in a cheese-enriched white sauce is the standard French treatment, *au gratin* referring not to grated cheese but to the browned crust itself, from the same root as the verb *gratter*, to scrape.