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Turnips in White Sauce
Wash and pare; cut in pieces. Cook, mash, and season; or cut in cubes, cook in boiling salted water until tender, and serve in white sauce.
A skeleton entry of the kind common in early twentieth-century books, where the white sauce itself was assumed knowledge from an earlier page. Two dishes are offered in one line: mashed turnip, or cubed turnip napped with sauce.
- The white sauceA medium white sauce of the period is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, salt and white pepper, cooked until the flour loses its raw taste. The recipe names no quantity of turnip; for roughly 2 lb, one cup of sauce is enough to coat without drowning.
- Which turnipThe text names no variety, but purple-top white turnips are the likely intent rather than rutabaga ("Swede" or yellow turnip), which is denser, sweeter and needs appreciably longer cooking. Choose roots no larger than a tennis ball; big ones turn woody and sharp.
- Cut and timingHalf-inch cubes are tender in 8 to 12 minutes in boiling salted water. For mashing, quarters take 15 to 20 minutes. Test with a knife tip rather than the clock, since age and size matter more than either.
- Drain hard for the mashTurnip holds a great deal of water. Return the drained pieces to the dry hot pan for a minute to steam off before mashing, or the purée will be soupy and no amount of butter will fix it.
- Season" means more than salt"Season" means more than salt -- For the mashed version, butter, salt, pepper and often a little cream would be typical; a scrape of nutmeg or a pinch of sugar tames any bitterness.
- CombiningFold the drained cubes into the finished sauce off direct heat and warm through gently. Boiling them in the sauce releases more water and thins it.
- YieldThe recipe states no quantity. Two pounds of trimmed turnip will serve about four as a side dish.
Turnips were one of the cheapest and longest-keeping roots in a New England cellar, which is why a book like this can dispose of them in a single line and expect no complaint. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard; like many promotional cookbooks of the era it surrounded its chocolate and cocoa recipes with a full domestic-science curriculum, so that the volume would earn a place on the kitchen shelf. The vegetable chapter follows the pattern familiar from the Boston Cooking School tradition: a master sauce is taught once, then invoked by name for a dozen vegetables, and white sauce with cubed root vegetables was a common genteel treatment of the day.