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Stuffed Turnips
6 turnips, even in size. 1 tablespoon butter. 2 slices bacon. 2 teaspoons milk. 1/2 teaspoon chopped onion. 1/2 cup fresh crumbs. Salt and pepper to taste. Boil turnips until tender, and cut off tops and scoop out center. Chop fine with bacon, onion, bread crumbs and milk and fry in butter. Put in turnip shells, sprinkle with crumbs, piece of butter on each and bake 10 minutes.
Nice way to cut turnips as a rose, steam until tender, color any shade. Serve creamed turnips in same. A perfect calla lily can be made of a thin slice of turnip pinned together at one side with carrot center, using parsley for stem.
A wartime-thrift vegetable dish from Mrs. Wilson, written in her usual telegraphic style: the method assumes you already know how to hollow a boiled root and brown a stuffing. Two things need filling in, the oven heat and the bacon.
- Cook the bacon properlyThe bacon goes into the pan raw, chopped with the scooped-out turnip, crumbs and onion. Fry the mixture long enough that the bacon is fully rendered and cooked through before it is packed back into the shells; the 10-minute bake is only for heating and browning.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A hot oven, around 400-425F, is right for a 10-minute finish that browns the crumb topping without drying the shells.
- Turnip size and typeThe recipe asks only for six turnips even in size; most likely the white purple-topped kind, and small ones are easier to handle. Larger turnips and rutabagas (swedes) hold more filling but need longer boiling and can turn woody at the core.
- Boiling and scoopingBoil whole and unpeeled so the shells hold their shape, 20-30 minutes depending on size, then peel the skin away once cool enough to handle. Leave a wall about a quarter-inch thick or the shell collapses when filled.
- Fresh crumbsNot dried breadcrumbs from a canister. Soft crumbs from day-old bread absorb the milk and bind the filling; dry crumbs will drink it up and leave the stuffing sandy. Use dried or panko only for the sprinkling on top.
- The two teaspoons of milkThat is not a typo for tablespoons. The milk is there to moisten the crumbs, not to make a sauce. Add it after the crumbs are in the pan and stop when the mixture just holds together.
- The garnish notesThe last three sentences are a separate thought: turnip carved into rose shapes, steamed, and tinted with food coloring, or a calla lily cut from a thin slice with a carrot stamen. This is table-decoration practice of the period rather than part of the stuffed-turnip method.
- YieldSix turnips serve six as a side, or three as a light supper dish.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and is generally described as having been involved in food-conservation work during the First World War; her cookbook carries that stamp throughout: vegetables treated as the center of a dish, meat used in slices rather than pounds, bread saved as crumbs. Two rashers of bacon flavoring six turnips is conservation cooking of a kind that outlived the emergency that produced it. The stuffed-and-rebaked vegetable itself is far older, a standard technique applied to whatever the cellar held, and the turnip was among the common winter-store roots in northern kitchens before the potato came to dominate. The carved roses and calla lilies at the end belong to a different tradition again, the elaborate garnishing associated with domestic-science teaching of the period, when a well-set table was held to be part of the cook's work.