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Salsify or Oyster Plant Soup
1 bunch or one dozen salsify roots, 3 even tablespoonfuls of flour, 1 quart of milk, 1 tablespoonful of butter, Salt and pepper to taste.
Scrape the salsify, cut it into slices, cover with a pint of boiling water, boil slowly one hour. Add to this the milk; do not drain off the water. Rub the butter and flour together, stir into the soup and stir continually until it boils. Add six whole allspice and a blade of mace. Let
A plain milk-thickened root soup that depends on one thing: the salsify cooking down in its own water so the starch and the faintly oyster-like flavor stay in the pot. The text breaks off mid-sentence in the original; the last step is simply to simmer a few minutes with the spices, then strain them out before serving.
- Do not drain the cooking waterThe instruction is explicit and it is the hinge of the recipe. That pint of water holds nearly all the sweetness and the light starch that gives the soup body; discarding it leaves you with spiced milk.
- Salsify oxidizes fastScraped roots turn gray-brown within minutes. Drop the slices into water with a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of vinegar as you work, then cook them in fresh water so the acid does not fight the milk later.
- An hour is long by modern standardsSliced salsify is tender in 20 to 30 minutes at a slow simmer. The full hour was aimed at breaking the roots down into the liquid; if you want that effect, cook them until collapsing and mash or blend, but check the pot early so it does not boil dry.
- Quantity of rootsA bunch of a dozen roots is roughly 1 to 2 lb trimmed, depending on their size. Sold as salsify or oyster plant, sometimes as scorzonera, which is the black-skinned relative and works the same way.
- Blade of maceA blade is a single piece of the dried aril from nutmeg, about an inch long. Ground mace can stand in, on the order of an eighth to a quarter teaspoon, but it will leave specks and cannot be fished out.
- Remove the whole spicesSix allspice berries and the mace are there to perfume the milk, not to be eaten. Strain or lift them out after five to ten minutes of simmering.
- The roux is uncookedButter and flour rubbed together raw and stirred in is a beurre manié. It must reach a boil and hold there briefly, with constant stirring, or the soup tastes of raw flour. Keep the heat moderate once the milk is in, since scorched milk cannot be fixed.
- YieldAbout five cups, serving four as a first course.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is often said to have earned the name oyster plant from a mild sweetness that nineteenth-century cooks compared to oysters, and American cookbooks leaned hard on the comparison, offering mock oyster soup and salsify "fritters" as an inland substitute for shellfish. It was a common kitchen-garden root through the 1800s, easy to overwinter in the ground, and it appears in vegetable-cookery collections of this period alongside parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes as one of the roots a household grew rather than bought. The seasoning here, whole allspice and a blade of mace steeped in milk and then removed, is an older English habit that survived in American soup and sauce making well into the twentieth century.