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Ruta Baga
Ruta bagas may be cooked the same as common white They are exceedingly nice browned to serve turnips. with ducks or geese.
This is a cross-reference rather than a full method: the book assumes you have already read its directions for white turnips. What follows fills in the parts a modern cook needs.
- What a ruta baga isThe yellow-fleshed swede, sold in North America as rutabaga and in Britain as swede or neep. It is denser and sweeter than the white turnip the author sends you back to, and it generally takes longer to cook through.
- The implied base methodPeel deeply, since the skin is tough and can be bitter, cut into even chunks, and boil in salted water until a knife slides in without resistance, about 25 to 35 minutes for 1-inch pieces. Drain thoroughly; watery rutabaga will not brown.
- "Browned" means finished in fatIn this period browning a boiled root meant turning it in hot dripping, butter or the fat from the roasting pan until the cut faces caramelize. In a modern kitchen a hot heavy skillet or a 425F oven does the same thing in 15 to 20 minutes.
- Why it is paired with duck and gooseBoth birds render a great deal of fat and both are rich enough to be well matched by a strong, slightly bitter vegetable. Rendered poultry fat would have been an obvious medium for the browning, though the recipe does not say so.
- QuantityOne medium rutabaga of about 1 1/2 lb, peeled, serves four as a side dish. They are sold much larger than white turnips, so a single root often goes further than the phrasing suggests.
- StorageRutabagas keep for weeks in a cold cellar or the bottom of the refrigerator, which is why nineteenth-century books treat them as a winter standby rather than a delicacy.
The ruta baga takes its name from Swedish dialect rotabagge, usually glossed as "root bag" or thick root, and reached English and American gardens around the late eighteenth century, well after the common white turnip was long established. It was grown heavily as cattle fodder, and a book like this gives it a few lines appended to the turnip entry rather than an entry of its own. The serving note is the useful part: pairing the root with roast duck or goose fits a broader European habit of setting strong-flavored winter vegetables against fatty poultry, echoed in the Scottish neeps served with rich meats and in turnips roasted in the fat under a goose.