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Turnip Puree
2 cups grated turnip 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1/2 cup cream Wash, peel and grate a sufficient number of turnips to make two cups. New turnips are best for this recipe. To the cream add the lemon juice and salt, and beat thoroughly; then pour over the grated turnip.
Despite the name, nothing is cooked and nothing is pureed: this is a raw grated turnip salad dressed with soured cream. It stands or falls on the turnips themselves.
- Use young white turnips"New turnips" means small spring turnips, with thin skin and a sweet, faintly sharp bite. Large storage turnips are woodier and more sulfurous raw, and rutabaga (often sold as swede or yellow turnip) is stronger and more fibrous, so it makes a poor substitute here.
- Cream means heavy creamCream means a fairly rich cream -- Older cookbooks use "cream" loosely, and it can mean anything from thin to thick. For this dressing use heavy or whipping cream; half-and-half or light cream thickens less against the lemon juice and is likelier to run off the turnip.
- Why you beat the lemon into the creamThe acid thickens the cream and gives a tang somewhat like crème fraîche (which is actually cultured, not acidulated). Add the lemon juice gradually while whisking rather than all at once, which helps avoid grainy curds.
- Salt draws waterTwo cups of grated turnip will start weeping within minutes of being salted. Dress it just before it goes to the table; if it sits, the dressing thins into a pool at the bottom of the bowl.
- GratingThe coarse side of a box grater or a food processor shredding disc both work. Avoid the fine rasp of a microplane, which reduces turnip to pulp and free liquid.
- Yield and servingTwo cups of grated turnip makes about four small side servings. Serve cold, on lettuce or alongside bread and cheese; a grind of black pepper and a little chopped parsley are period-appropriate additions.
- On "meat substitute"Protein -- Turnip and cream supply almost no protein by modern reckoning. If you are building a meal around this, treat it as a salad course and put the protein elsewhere.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in English-speaking countries in the 1910s, when wartime food administration campaigns pressed households toward meatless and wheatless days, and publishers met the demand with whole volumes of substitutions. A "meat substitutes" heading in such books is often looser than it sounds: it could cover anything intended to occupy the center of a plate where a chop or roast would have gone, whether or not it resembled meat nutritionally. Raw grated root vegetables dressed with acidulated cream also appear in northern European cooking, where turnips were among the few vegetables a cellar could hold through the winter, and cream soured with lemon or vinegar was one common dressing. Mature turnips do taste harsher raw than new ones, which may be what lies behind the recipe's insistence on new turnips.