Home › Recipes › Oyster Plant Salad
Oyster Plant Salad
Two pounds of oyster plants, vinegar, one lemon, one onion, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, two tablespoons flour, French dressing, mayonnaise dressing. Scrape the plants, plunge them as soon as they are done in water acidulated with vinegar, then cut into inch long pieces. Dilute two tablespoonfuls of flour with two quarts of water, add to it salt and the juice of a lemon, an onion, a bunch of parsley, thyme, and bay leaf; boil up the liquid, then put in the oyster plants and let simmer until thoroughly cooked. Drain and cool, and cut each one into four pieces lengthwise. Arrange in a salad bowl, cover with a French dressing, chopped parsley, and half an hour before serving cover with a mayonnaise dressing.
Oyster plant is salsify, and nearly everything that can go wrong here happens in the first five minutes, before the pot is even hot. The recipe is a French blanc — a flour-thickened cooking liquid — adapted for an American salad course.
- What to buyOyster plant is salsify, Tragopogon porrifolius: long, tapering, pale beige roots sold at farmers' markets and some greengrocers in autumn and winter. Black salsify (scorzonera) is a different plant but is prepared the same way and can stand in here. Expect some loss to trimming and scraping.
- The garbled line"Plunge them as soon as they are done" means as soon as they are done being scraped, not cooked. Peeled salsify browns within a minute or two, so keep a bowl of water with a splash of vinegar beside you and drop each root in as you finish it.
- Why the flourThe two tablespoons of flour whisked into the water make a blanc, a classic French cooking medium for pale vegetables. It keeps the salsify from darkening and holds the acid and aromatics in suspension. Whisk the flour into a little cold water first, then add the rest, or you will fish out lumps.
- The aromatics are wholeThe onion goes in whole or halved, the parsley as a tied bunch with the thyme and bay, as in a court bouillon, and all of it is discarded. Only the second handful of parsley, chopped, ends up in the bowl.
- Cooking time"Simmer until thoroughly cooked" is 20 to 40 minutes depending on thickness. Test with the tip of a knife: it should meet no resistance. Undercooked salsify is woody and no amount of dressing hides it.
- Cool in the liquid"Drain and cool" works, but letting the pieces cool in their cooking liquid seasons them further and keeps them from drying at the cut edges. Drain well before dressing or the mayonnaise will slacken.
- The half hourThe French dressing goes on first and is absorbed; the mayonnaise goes on thirty minutes before serving, and is meant to stay a distinct top layer rather than be tossed through. Keep the bowl refrigerated during that half hour.
- Mayonnaise and eggsA period mayonnaise is raw yolk, oil and vinegar. If you make it from scratch, use pasteurized eggs, and do not leave the finished salad standing at room temperature.
- YieldServes six as a salad course, four as a side.
Salsify earned the name oyster plant from a supposed resemblance in flavor to the oyster — a comparison that is traditional rather than convincing, and one nineteenth-century writers repeated endlessly. A Mediterranean root long grown in European kitchen gardens, it was a staple of American seed catalogues and household gardens through the 1800s, valued because it kept in the ground over winter and could be dug as needed. Its appearance in a salad collection reflects the era's fashion for cooked-vegetable salads dressed in the French manner: the blanc, the court bouillon of onion and bouquet garni, and the double dressing of vinaigrette followed by mayonnaise are all borrowed straight from professional French practice, filtered through the American cookbook trade. Salsify fell out of general use in the twentieth century, and it now reads as a specialty crop rather than the ordinary winter root it once was.