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Hashed Turnips
Chop the boiled and drained turnips into rather large pieces. Return to the saucepan, and for a pint and a half of turnips, add a teaspoon of salt, one-quarter of a teaspoon pepper, a tablespoon butter, and four tablespoons water. Cook over a very hot fire until the turnips have absorbed all the seasoning. Serve at once. Parsnips may also be cooked in this way.
A short, blunt recipe that depends entirely on turnips already boiled and drained well. The only real technique is the fast reduction at the end.
- QuantityA pint and a half of chopped turnip is about 3 cups, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of raw turnip once peeled. Serves three or four as a side.
- Drain thoroughlyThe hinge of the dish. Turnips hold a great deal of water; if they go back into the pan wet, the four tablespoons of added water never cook off and you get a pale, bland mash instead of glazed pieces. Let them steam dry in the colander for a few minutes first.
- "A very hot fire"High heat on a burner, uncovered, shaking the pan. Two to four minutes is usually enough for the liquid to disappear and the butter to coat the pieces. Longer and the large chunks collapse.
- Salt levelA full teaspoon for three cups is generous by modern taste, particularly if the turnips were salted in their boiling water. Add half, taste at the end, then adjust.
- Turnip or swede"turnip" in period cookbooks can cover both the small white turnip and the yellow rutabaga, and this recipe does not specify which. White turnips cook faster and taste sharper; rutabaga is sweeter and wants a slightly longer boil before hashing.
- ParsnipsThe variant works, but parsnips are far sweeter and scorch quickly in butter over high heat. Keep the pan moving and pull them off as soon as the water goes.
- Worth addingNothing in the original, but a grind of black pepper at the table and a little chopped parsley or a scrape of nutmeg suit the dish.
"Hashed" here means simply chopped, not fried in the manner of a meat hash — the older sense of the word, from the French hacher, to chop. Meatless cookery leaned on root vegetables because they were cheap and stored through winter without canning; a book placing hashed turnips under "Meat Substitutes" suggests the dish is meant to occupy the center of the plate, not the edge. Turnips carried a long reputation as poverty food in both Britain and America, and much of the effort in recipes like this one goes into countering their wateriness and bitterness with butter, salt and a hard, quick finish over the heat.