Turnips, Mashed
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons. - 10 or 12 large turnips, to each 1/2 gallon of water allow 1 heaped tablespoonful of salt, 2 oz. of butter, cayenne or white pepper to taste. AVERAGE COST, 6d.
Pare the turnips, quarter them, and put them into boiling water, salted in the above 420 TURNIPS IN WHITE SAUCE. proportion: boil them until tender; then drain them in a colander, and squeeze them as dry as possible by pressing them with the back of a large plate. When quite free from water, rub the turnips with a wooden spoon through the colander, and put them into a very clean saucepan; add the butter, white pepper or cayenne, and, if necessary, a little salt. Keep stirring them over the fire until the butter is well mixed with them, and the turnips are thoroughly hot; dish, and serve. A little cream or milk, added after the turnips are pressed through the colander, is an improvement to both the colour and flavour of this vegetable.
TIME. From to hour to boil the turnips; 10 minutes to warm them through.
SEASONABLE. - May be had all the year; but in early spring only good for flavouring gravies.
A plain Victorian purée whose success rests entirely on how much water you drive out before the butter goes in. Everything else is seasoning.
- The hinge: get them dryTurnips hold a great deal of water, and mashed wet they go grey and soupy. The pressing with the back of a plate is not a nicety — drain well, press hard, then dry the purée for a minute or two over low heat before adding fat.
- Which turnipBeeton most likely means the white summer turnip rather than the yellow swede (rutabaga), though the recipe names no variety. Ten or twelve large ones is generous for six by modern appetites; about 3 lb of trimmed turnip is plenty. Pare thickly — the outer layer under the skin is fibrous and bitter.
- Missing timeThe printed time has dropped out of the text. Quartered turnips take roughly 20 to 30 minutes in boiling water, until a knife meets no resistance. Undercooked turnip will not pass through a sieve.
- Salt proportionA heaped tablespoon of salt to half a gallon (about 2.3 litres) is a firmly seasoned cooking water, closer to modern pasta water than to a timid pinch. It seasons the vegetable from within, which matters when the finished dish gets only butter and pepper.
- Butter and cream2 oz is 4 tablespoons, roughly 55 g. The optional cream or milk is worth taking up: a few tablespoons of warm cream loosens the purée and softens the mustard-sharp edge turnips carry.
- Sieve or ricerRubbing through a colander with a wooden spoon works but is slow. A food mill or potato ricer gives the same result faster. Avoid a food processor, which makes turnip gluey and thin.
- SeasoningCayenne rather than black pepper is the period preference and suits the vegetable — a small pinch, enough to warm rather than announce itself. White pepper keeps the colour clean.
- Season and qualityBeeton's note holds. Spring turnips that have been stored all winter turn woody and strongly flavoured; they are better used to build stock than mashed. Young summer and autumn turnips are the ones worth this treatment.
Mashed turnip is a dish of the English kitchen garden rather than of any chef, and it appears in Beeton alongside a long run of similarly plain vegetable entries. The average cost of sixpence is a reminder of what turnips were: cheap, storable, grown everywhere, and for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as important for feeding livestock through winter as people — the turnip's place in crop rotation is generally credited with reshaping English farming. The butter and the optional cream are what lift it from fodder to a dish for the table, and Beeton's insistence on squeezing out the water is the accumulated wisdom of cooks who had eaten a great deal of watery turnip.