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Greens, Boiled Turnip
INGREDIENTS.-To each gallon of water allow 1 heaped tablespoonful of salt; turnipgreens.
Wash the green well in two or three waters, and pick off all the decayed and dead leaves; tie them in small bunches, and put them into plenty of boiling water, salted in the above proportion. Keep them boiling quickly, with the lid of the saucepan off, and when tender pour them into a colander; let them drain, arrange them in a vegetable-dish, remove the string that the greens were tied with and serve.
TIME.-15 to 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE in March, April and May.
A plain method for turnip tops that still works, though modern taste calls for a shorter boil and a good deal less water. Note that the ingredient line has picked up a stray heading — "Roast Grouse" — from the facing column of the original book; the recipe itself is entirely about greens.
- The hinge: lid offBoiling brassicas uncovered lets the sulphur compounds escape as steam instead of condensing back into the pot. It is the difference between sweet greens and greens that smell of cabbage water, and it is worth obeying literally.
- Salt proportionOne heaped tablespoon to an imperial gallon is roughly 25-30 g of salt to about 4.5 litres. Some modern cooks salt green vegetable water more heavily than this so the greens season as they cook.
- What turnip greens areThe leafy tops of the turnip plant, sold as turnip tops; the Italian cime di rapa is a close relative often sold under the same name. Mustard greens or young kale leaves stand in reasonably well; they are stronger and slightly tougher.
- TimeFifteen to twenty minutes is long by modern standards. Young bunched greens are tender in 4 to 8 minutes -- drain them the moment the stems give to a knife tip.
- Tying in bunchesThe string holds the leaves together so they can be lifted out of the water and drained in one go; the recipe has you remove it before serving. Skip it if you plan to chop them, but it does make draining tidier.
- Draining properlyTurnip tops hold a surprising amount of water. Press them gently in the colander, or the vegetable dish will fill with grey liquid before the greens reach the table.
- ServingBeeton serves them plain, with nothing added. Butter, a scrape of nutmeg, or olive oil and lemon all suit them.
- SeasonMarch to May is when the plant bolts and the tops are at their best — before flowering they are sweet, after it they turn bitter and fibrous.
Turnip tops were for centuries the cheap half of a cheap crop: the root fed livestock and the poor through winter, and the leaves that came up as the plant ran to seed in early spring were among the first fresh green things available after months of stored food. Beeton gives a season for vegetables throughout the book, and here it is narrow: March, April and May. Boiling hard in plenty of salted water with the lid off was the usual English treatment for green vegetables of the period, and unlike much Victorian vegetable cookery the reasoning behind it holds up. The instruction to pick off "decayed and dead leaves" is a reminder that these greens arrived from market or garden unwashed and ungraded, nothing like a sealed bag.