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Winter Radishes
of water, cover and cook slowly in the oven one hour ; then remove the cover and cook one hour longer. As the water evaporates add fresh. This very homely sounding dish is, if well prepared, very appetizing.
The page as printed picks up mid-sentence, so the quantity of radishes and whatever fat or seasoning went into the dish are missing. What survives is the method, and the method is the useful part: a long, slow, covered braise followed by an equally long uncovered one.
- The text is a fragmentOnly the tail of the recipe survives, beginning partway through "...of water." The quantity of radishes, the depth of water and any butter or salt are all lost; any figure you use is a guess rather than a reconstruction of the original.
- What a winter radish isNot the small red salad radish. Winter radishes are the large storage sorts — black Spanish, China Rose, and the long white types sold now as daikon or mooli. They are dense, sharp raw, and mild and slightly sweet once cooked, which is what makes two hours of braising sensible.
- "Cook slowly in the oven"No temperature is given. A modern moderate-to-low oven, somewhere around 300-325F, is a reasonable reading; hotter and you will be topping up the water more often during the uncovered hour, which is presumably why the recipe tells you to.
- Why the cover comes offThe first hour steams the radish through; the second reduces the liquid and concentrates it around the pieces. Left covered throughout, you would end up with radish simply boiled in its water.
- Adding fresh waterThe recipe says only to add fresh water as it evaporates. Hot water rather than cold will disturb the cooking less, and enough to keep the bottom of the dish wet is all that is called for.
- Cut sizeA large winter radish is best peeled and cut into thick slices, or halved lengthwise and cut in chunks. Large whole roots are unlikely to be done in two hours; very thin slices will collapse.
- Seasoning at the endButter, salt and a good deal of black pepper at the table. Cooked radish takes acid well — a spoonful of vinegar or lemon in the last twenty minutes sharpens a dish that otherwise reads flat.
- YieldThe original quantity is lost with the missing text; about two pounds of trimmed winter radish would serve four as a side dish.
Winter radishes were a staple of the northern European root cellar long before they were a curiosity: black Spanish and long white varieties store for months in sand, and they carried households through the stretch between the last of the autumn vegetables and the first spring greens. Cooking them, rather than shaving them raw into salads, is the more workaday treatment — long heat drives off the mustard-oil pungency that makes them bite and leaves something closer to a turnip.