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Winter Radishes with Cream Sauce
Pare and cut the radishes in slices crosswise. Throw them into boiling water, boil twenty minutes. Turn them into a heated dish, cover with Cream Sauce and serve very hot.
A plain boiled-and-sauced treatment of the large keeping radishes that filled winter root cellars. The recipe assumes you already have a cream sauce made from a companion page.
- What a winter radish isNot the small red salad radish, which cooks down to very little. The book means the large storage types — black Spanish, the long white varieties, or what a supermarket now sells as daikon.
- Cut thickness governs the timeThe recipe gives no thickness, only "slices crosswise." Twenty minutes would suit fairly thick rounds from a dense root; thin slices will be mush well before that, so check with a knife tip at eight to ten minutes and pull them while they still hold their shape.
- Salt the waterThe original says only boiling water. Winter radishes are watery and bland once cooked, so salt the pot as you would for potatoes or the dish arrives flat under the sauce.
- Mustard heat cooks offThe pungency of a raw winter radish comes from volatile compounds that boiling drives away, leaving something closer to a mild turnip. If you want a trace of bite, keep the boil brief and finish in the sauce.
- The cream sauce meant hereCream sauce of this period is usually a white roux — butter and flour in roughly equal measure cooked without colouring, then milk or thin cream whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and a little white pepper or nutmeg. The companion page will give the book's own proportions.
- Drain hardBoiled radish carries a lot of water. Tip the slices into a colander and let them steam dry a minute before saucing, or the sauce thins on the plate. "Serve very hot" is the point of the heated dish — this one goes lukewarm fast.
Before greenhouse produce and year-round shipping, the large black and white radishes were a cellar vegetable in the same class as turnips and salsify: sown late, lifted in autumn, packed in sand and eaten through the cold months. Cookbooks of the period regularly treated them as a cooked root rather than a salad item, boiling or stewing them and covering the result in one of the handful of standard white sauces that did duty across an entire vegetable chapter. That reliance on a single cream sauce is characteristic of the vegetable cookery of such books, and the sauce supplied the interest, which is also why such books print the sauce once and cross-reference it repeatedly.