Salsify, to Dress
INGREDIENTS.
Salsify; to each 1/2 gallon of water allow 1 heaped tablespoonful of salt, 1 oz. of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of lemon-juice..
Scrape the roots gently, so as to strip them only of their outside peel; cut them into pieces about 4 inches long, and, as they are peeled, throw them into water with which has been mixed a little lemonjuice, to prevent their discolouring. Put them into boiling water, with salt, butter and lemon-juice in the above proportion, and let them boil rapidly until tender; try them with a fork, and, when it penetrates easily, they are done. Drain the salsify, and serve with a good white sauce or French melted butter.
TIME.-30 to 50 minutes.
SEASONABLE in winter.
Note. This vegetable may be also boiled, sliced and fried in batter of a nice brown. When crisp and a good colour, they should be served with fried parsley in the centre of the dish, and a little fine salt sprinkled over the salsify.
SANDWICHES, CUCUMBER to every time they are used, and, therefore, a jar full of well-dried table salt should always be kept ready to fill them. Another little thing (too often forgotten by servants) to be remembered, should be the removal of the spoons when the cellars are taken from the table.
A straightforward boiled root, but the timing and the sauce names need translating, and the tail end of this entry is stray text from a neighbouring page on salt cellars — ignore it.
- The hinge: acidulated waterSalsify oxidises to a dull grey-brown within a minute of peeling. Have a bowl of cold water with a good squeeze of lemon ready before you touch the roots, and move each piece into it as it is scraped.
- Imperial measuresMrs Beeton's half gallon is the imperial half gallon, about 2.3 litres — call it 10 cups. To that, one heaped tablespoon salt, 1 oz (30 g) butter and 2 tablespoons lemon juice.
- TimingThirty to fifty minutes suits the thick, woody winter roots of a Victorian market. Modern cultivated salsify, usually finger-thick, is tender in 15 to 25 minutes. Test with a fork or skewer from 15 minutes on; overcooked salsify collapses into fibres.
- Scrape, don't peel deepThe instruction to strip only the outside peel matters — the flavour sits just under the skin. A vegetable peeler taking thin strips, or a stiff brush on young roots, is enough. Wear gloves if the milky sap bothers your hands.
- "French melted butter"Not simply melted butter. In Beeton it is a butter sauce thickened with a little flour and liquid and brought to a simmer, rather than plain drawn butter. Any thin modern butter sauce fills the same role on the plate; beurre blanc and hollandaise are made quite differently but serve the same purpose.
- Good white sauceA béchamel made with milk, or half milk and half the cooking water, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Keep it thin enough to coat rather than cling.
- The fritter variationFor the fried version, boil the roots first, slice them, pat them thoroughly dry and batter them; wet salsify will not brown. Fry at 350–375F. The fried parsley in the centre of the dish is dropped into the same fat for a few seconds only, until it stops sputtering.
- YieldReckon about 1 lb (450 g) of roots for three or four as a side dish.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), also called the purple goatsbeard or vegetable oyster, was a common kitchen-garden root in Britain and America through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and one of its attractions was that it could be left in the ground through the winter — which fits Beeton's laconic "seasonable in winter." The nickname oyster plant comes from a faint resemblance in flavour that is traditionally claimed rather than universally agreed; the related black-skinned scorzonera was often sold and cooked interchangeably with it. Why it largely vanished from British and American shops in the twentieth century is not well documented, though the awkwardness of long, brittle, easily broken roots is often suggested; it is still easier to find in French and Italian markets and in seed catalogues. The two treatments here — boiled under a white sauce, or sliced and fried in batter with a bouquet of fried parsley — are much the way a Victorian cook handled any mild winter root, and the fried version is the one worth reviving.