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Turnip Tops or Sprouts
Wash a quarter of a peck of turnip tops in cold water; throw them into a kettle of boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt, boil twenty minutes, drain. Turn into a vegetable dish garnished with slices of hard-boiled eggs and serve the same as spinach. In the spring of the year turnips become wilted and are not fit to use. Then use the sprouts. They may also be served as a salad, dressed with French dressing.
A plain boiled-greens recipe from the era when turnip tops were a spring windfall rather than a purchase. Two things need adjusting: the quantity language and the boiling time.
- A quarter of a peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, so this is 2 quarts of loosely packed leaves. Buy a large bunch or two.
- Twenty minutes is too longYoung turnip tops are tender and lose their colour and bite well before that. Five to eight minutes in heavily salted boiling water is enough for spring sprouts; older, coarser leaves with thick midribs may want ten to twelve. Taste a leaf rather than watching the clock.
- Salt the water properlyA teaspoon in a full kettle of water seasons almost nothing. Treat it like pasta water — a tablespoon or more per gallon — since boiled greens take their only seasoning from the pot.
- Wash more than onceTurnip tops grow low and hold grit in the crinkled leaf. Swish in a sinkful of cold water, lift the leaves out rather than pouring off, and repeat until no sand settles.
- Drain hardPress the drained greens against the side of a colander or squeeze in a towel. Waterlogged greens dilute whatever dressing or butter follows and pool in the dish.
- "Serve the same as spinach"In this period that means turned into a hot dish with butter, salt and pepper, sometimes a spoonful of vinegar or a squeeze of lemon. The hard-boiled egg garnish adds a little richness against the mustardy bitterness, though far less than the bacon fat or salt pork a Southern cook would use.
- The salad optionFrench dressing here means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, not a sweet bottled sauce. For raw salad use only the smallest, palest sprouts; anything with a developed midrib is too tough and too bitter uncooked.
- Turnip sproutsThe recipe most likely means the tender shoots thrown out by overwintered or stored turnips in spring, not seedlings. Supermarket turnip greens take the same treatment; mustard greens and broccoli rabe are close substitutes, though sharper.
Turnip tops belong to the long tradition of eating the whole plant, and they mattered most at exactly the moment this recipe describes: late winter and early spring, when the stored roots had gone spongy and soft but were still alive enough to throw out fresh green shoots. That made sprouts one of the earliest green vegetables of the year in northern kitchens. The instruction to serve them "the same as spinach" reflects a common nineteenth-century habit of grouping leafy greens under one method — boil, drain, dress — with the garnish of sliced hard-boiled egg standing in for the fat that Southern cooks supplied with salt pork. Turnips were grown for winter fodder as much as for the table, which is part of why their leaves carried a reputation as humble food; the same greens are now sold on their own merits, and the mustard-family bitterness that once had to be softened with egg and vinegar is closer to the point of eating them.