Home › Vegetables › Turnips in Cream
Turnips in Cream
8 turnips 2 cups milk 4 tablespoons flour 4 tablespoons butter or other fat Salt and pepper Pare the turnips, cut them in small pieces, cook until tender. Make a white sauce of the flour, fat, milk and seasonings. Pour sauce over turnips and serve.
A plain creamed vegetable of the sort that filled the middle of a 1930s dinner plate. The recipe assumes you know how to handle a white sauce, so the useful detail is in the proportions and in how far to cook the turnips.
- How many turnipsThe recipe gives no size or variety. Eight turnips most likely means eight medium ones, which will pare down to something in the region of 2 lb. If you are working with the large purple-topped winter sort, two or three will do; buy by weight rather than count.
- Cook them in salted waterSimmer the pieces in well-salted water, uncovered, 10 to 15 minutes for small dice, until a knife goes in with no resistance. Drain them thoroughly and let them steam dry a moment, or the sauce will thin out on the plate.
- Sauce thicknessFour tablespoons of flour to 2 cups of milk is a medium white sauce, thick enough to coat. Cook the flour in the fat for a minute or two before the milk goes in so it loses the raw taste.
- "Other fat"Common cookbook shorthand of the period for drippings, margarine or shortening. Butter is worth using here; turnips have little of their own richness to carry a neutral fat.
- Season past what seems rightTurnip absorbs salt, and a milk sauce mutes it further. Season the sauce assertively and taste again after combining. White pepper keeps the dish from being flecked, if that matters to you.
- BitternessOlder, larger turnips can turn sharp. Blanching them briefly in plain water, draining, then finishing in fresh salted water will take some of the edge off.
- YieldServes six to eight as a side. It reheats poorly once the sauce has been sitting on the turnips, so combine at the last minute.
Creamed vegetables were the workhorse of American home cooking between the wars, and the white sauce behind them was taught as a formula rather than a recipe: so many tablespoons of flour and fat per cup of milk, thin for soups, medium for vegetables, thick for croquettes. That standardisation is generally traced to the cooking-school teachers of the late nineteenth century, and by the time this book appeared it was assumed knowledge, which is why the instruction here is a single clause. The turnip itself was a cheap keeper, stored through winter in cellars and root pits long before it was a market vegetable, and dressing it in milk and butter was the usual way of making a humble root fit for the table.