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Boiled Turnips
Have the turnips peeled and sliced and drop them into boiling water sufficient to cover. Cook until tender; drain well; chop them or mash with a wooden potato masher. Season with salt, butter and pepper and serve at once.
A four-line method that assumes you already know what a good turnip tastes like. The variables the original leaves out are size, salt and drainage.
- QuantityFigure about 2 lb of turnips for four people as a side dish; they lose a good deal of volume once mashed. Choose roots no bigger than a tennis ball, since large ones turn woody and sharply bitter.
- Salt the waterThe instruction to season only at the end is worth overriding. Salt the cooking water as you would for potatoes; unsalted turnip absorbs water rather than flavour and tastes flat no matter how much butter goes in afterwards.
- Cut size and timingSliced about half an inch thick, turnips are tender in 15 to 20 minutes. Test with a knife tip rather than the clock, and stop as soon as there is no resistance in the centre, since overcooked turnip collapses into a grey slurry.
- Drain well means very wellThis is the hinge of the dish. Turnips hold far more water than potatoes, so return them to the dry hot pan for a minute over low heat to steam off the excess before mashing, or the result will be soupy.
- The wooden masherAny potato masher or a food mill works. Avoid a food processor or immersion blender, which shears the flesh into something thin and gluey.
- SeasoningTwo to three tablespoons of butter per pound suits the dish, though the original gives no quantity. A grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of cream is a common addition, and mashing in a boiled potato or two will absorb residual moisture and soften the flavour.
- Serve at onceMeant literally. Mashed turnip cools quickly, weeps liquid on standing and is much duller reheated, so hold it in a covered dish over hot water if there is any delay.
Turnips were the everyday winter root of northern Europe and colonial America long before the potato displaced them, cheap to grow, easy to store in a cellar or clamp, and sturdy enough to feed both households and livestock. By the time books like this one were being sold to American housekeepers, the turnip had settled into the plain-vegetable middle of the menu: boiled, mashed, buttered, and set beside boiled meat. If this page comes from a loose-leaf book, its brevity may be a period detail: such books were sold as working systems, with pages meant to be added, swapped and annotated. Note too the assumption that someone else has done the peeling and slicing before the page is consulted.