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Yellow Turnips
Prepare yellow turnips or rutabagas, as they are sometimes called, in the same manner as white turnips, but leave in the cooker from one to two hours longer, as they require more cooking.
This is a cross-reference entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already read the book's method for white turnips in the fireless cooker. What it really tells you is that rutabaga is a denser, tougher root than the white turnip and needs substantially more time.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated box holding a heavy pot and, usually, a pair of soapstone or iron radiator discs heated on the range until nearly red. Food was brought fully to the boil on the stove, then sealed in the box to finish on stored heat with no further fuel. A modern slow cooker or a vacuum thermal cooker does the same job; a heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels inside a cooler is the closest literal equivalent.
- The step the book takes for grantedA fireless cooker supplies little heat of its own beyond whatever heated stone or iron discs are used with it. The turnips should be at a full boil in their liquid before the pot goes into the insulation, and the pot should be full and tightly lidded so it holds temperature; a half-empty pot loses heat much faster.
- "One to two hours longer"Longer than the book's own white turnip direction, whichever time that gives. Retained-heat cooking of rutabaga in chunks will want several hours; in a slow cooker, perhaps 3 to 4 hours on Low. Test with a knife tip rather than the clock.
- Rutabaga vs. turnipRutabaga (swede in Britain) is the yellow-fleshed cross of turnip and cabbage: larger, denser, sweeter, and often sold waxed. Peel deeply, taking off the woody outer layer, and cut into 1- to 1 1/2-inch pieces so the pieces cook evenly over a long unattended stretch.
- Liquid and seasoningUse only enough salted water to come partway up the turnips; retained-heat cooking loses almost no liquid to evaporation, and too much water leaves a flat, washed-out root. Salt at the start, since there is no chance to adjust mid-cook.
- FinishingLong gentle cooking leaves rutabaga soft but bland. Drain well, then mash with butter and pepper, or return the drained pieces to a hot dry pan for a minute to drive off water before mashing.
- YieldOne medium rutabaga of about 2 lb, peeled, gives roughly four servings mashed.
Fireless cookery was a serious household technology in the 1900s and 1910s, not a novelty: with a wood or coal range, keeping fire under a pot for four hours in July was an expensive and miserable proposition, so manufactured fireless cookers and homemade hay boxes let the cook boil food up briefly and then walk away. Root vegetables were the ideal candidate, and rutabaga most of all, being a keeper that came out of the root cellar all winter and needed the long cooking that a stove-top pot made costly. The vegetable itself is generally traced to a late-medieval or early modern cross between turnip and cabbage in northern Europe, and its American name comes from Swedish rotabagge, a dialect word whose sense is disputed — variously glossed as "baggy root" or "ram's root." That Mrs. Fryer files it as one line pointing back to the white turnip is telling in itself: the recipe is meant to be read against its neighbors rather than alone.