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Turnips with Cream Sauce
Pare six nice, crisp turnips and cut them into dice. Put them into a saucepan of boiling water and boil thirty minutes. Drain, turn into a heated dish. Pour over a half pint of Cream Sauce and serve.
Turnips cooked this way make a delightful, delicate vegetable to serve with roast poultry. One would scarcely recognize the coarse, mashed turnips so often seen.
A plain boiled-and-sauced vegetable whose only real fault is the timing. Everything else is a matter of translating the measures.
- Cut the boiling timeHalf-inch dice of turnip are tender in 8 to 12 minutes in salted water. Thirty minutes turns them to sodden pulp, which is precisely the "coarse, mashed turnips" the author is arguing against.
- Half a pintOne US cup of sauce, for six turnips. That is a light coating rather than a smothering, which suits the dish.
- Cream SauceThe book means a basic white sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then a cup of milk or thin cream whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg.
- Which turnip"Nice, crisp turnips" most likely points to small white turnips rather than the yellow swede or rutabaga sold as "turnip" in parts of the US and UK; smaller roots are the safer choice. Older, woody roots will stay fibrous no matter how long they cook.
- Drain hardTurnips hold a lot of water. Let them steam dry in the colander for a minute or two, or the sauce will thin out and pool in the dish.
- YieldSix small turnips serve four to six as a side. Scale the sauce with the vegetable rather than doubling it; the point here is a coating, not a stew.
Turnips were the workhorse root of the northern European kitchen long before the potato displaced them, and by the time this book was written they carried a distinctly unfashionable reputation in American cooking — cheap, watery, and usually boiled to death and mashed. The note at the end is a small piece of advocacy: cut small, cooked briefly, and dressed in a butter-and-milk sauce, the same root reads as a delicate dish fit to accompany roast poultry. That white sauce is itself the backbone of turn-of-the-century American vegetable cookery, appearing under the names cream sauce or white sauce in many general cookbooks of the period, and it was the standard means of making a plain boiled vegetable presentable at table.