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Radishes
Winter radishes may be simply pared, cut in quarters, and arranged neatly on a pretty shallow dish. Red radishes of the spring should have the roots neatly trimmed, half the top cut and trimmed, leaving little holders at the top. These may be arranged neatly in a glass dish, and served with cracked ice.
The round white radishes and the little button radishes may be served as follows: Cut off the roots close to the radish, then the tops about one inch from the radish, wash clean in cold water, then take a radish in the left hand, holding it by the top. Cut the skin from the top downwards, in several parts, as you cut an orange to remove the skin in sections, but do not detach the skin. Now run the point of the penknife under each little section of skin and loosen it down to the stem of the radish. Throw each radish as finished into a bowl of cold water. After a little practice this operation will be comparatively easy and the radishes will look more like tulips than like ordinary table radishes. Serve in a pretty dish with cracked ice, or use as a garnish for fish cutlets, lobster cutlets, breaded chops, etc. The skin of the radish should be eaten with the flesh, as it contains a substance that helps digest the radish itself.
This is a knife-and-presentation exercise rather than a cooked dish, and almost all of it still works. A few of the assumptions behind it have shifted.
- The hinge: cold water and timeThe petals do not open under the knife, they open in the water. The recipe says only to drop each finished radish into cold water, without a time; in practice the loosened sections need a good spell — half an hour or more, and colder is better — before they curl back into a tulip. Radishes cut and served immediately just look scored.
- Winter radishesThese are the large storage types - black Spanish, green meat, and the long white radishes now sold as daikon - not the small salad radishes sold year round now. They are dense and often sharply hot, so quarters are generous; cut them into thinner batons or slices for a modern relish tray.
- PenknifeA small folding pocket knife, used here as a paring knife. Any thin, very sharp paring knife or a bird's beak knife does the job better, and a dull blade will tear the skin rather than release it.
- Cracked iceAs much a cooling medium as a garnish, from a period when the dish went to the table with no refrigeration behind it. Crushed ice in a bowl with the radishes set on top works the same way; drain the radishes well first so the dish does not fill with water.
- "Little holders at the top"The retained leaf stems are a handle - spring radishes were picked up by the greens and dipped in salt or eaten with butter and bread. Trim the leaves to about an inch and wash the crowns carefully, since grit collects where the stems meet the root.
- The digestion claimThe assertion that radish skin contains a substance that digests the radish is period folk physiology, not chemistry. Leave the skin on for colour, texture and the pepperiness concentrated near the surface, which is the real reason to keep it.
- QuantityThe original gives none. Reckon on three or four small radishes a person as a relish or first course; a single large winter radish will serve four to six as quarters.
Radishes appear in nineteenth-century American and British cookery books largely as a raw relish, set out with celery, olives and salted nuts at the start of a meal - the course a French menu would call hors d'oeuvre and an English one simply the relishes - though cooked and pickled treatments, such as stewed radishes and pickled radish pods, do also appear. Here there are no cooking instructions at all, only carving. The tulip cut belongs to the same tradition as radish roses and turned mushrooms: garde-manger work taught to professional cooks and passed on to ambitious housekeepers, meant to dress up cold platters and to edge dishes like the breaded chops and fish cutlets named here. The distinction the writer draws between spring reds and winter radishes reflects a seasonal market that has largely disappeared; the big keeping radishes were a winter vegetable stored in sand or a root cellar, while the small forced reds signalled the first produce of the new year.