Home › Salad Dressings › Salad of Turnips with Asparagus Tips
Salad of Turnips with Asparagus Tips
Cook the turnips in boiling salted water until tender; drain, and cut out the centres, forming cups. Sprinkle the inside with oil and a few grains of salt, and, when the oil is absorbed, pour over
The text as printed breaks off mid-instruction, so the dressing and the asparagus never arrive on the page. What survives is the technique, and it is the part worth having: boiled turnips hollowed into cups, oiled while warm, then filled.
- The page is incompleteThe recipe stops at "pour over" — the dressing itself is missing. A plain oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper is the likeliest thing intended, but the text as printed does not say.
- Which turnipsSmall white turnips work best here, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches across, figuring about one per serving. Larger roots tend to be coarser at the core and hold a neat cup wall less well. Peel before boiling.
- Doneness is the hingeThe recipe says "until tender," but stop while a skewer still meets slight resistance — a rough 12-18 minutes depending on size. Turnips boiled to complete softness tend to collapse when you scoop the centre.
- Oil while warm"When the oil is absorbed" suggests the turnip is still warm. Drain, hollow, then oil at once; a cooled turnip absorbs less readily.
- "A few grains of salt"A period phrase for a small pinch, not a measured amount. Season lightly here — the turnips were already boiled in salted water and the dressing brings more.
- Asparagus tipsCut 2-inch tips and boil 2-4 minutes until just tender, then drop into cold water to hold the colour. Overcooked tips go olive-drab and limp inside the cup.
- ServingNothing survives about serving. Cold, one cup per person, dressed shortly before it goes to table, suits the dish: both vegetables shed water as they sit and will thin the dressing.
Vegetable salads built inside a hollowed-out vegetable were a fixture of American and English cookery around 1900, when the salad course was judged as much on presentation as on flavour — tomato cups, cucumber boats and turnip cups all appear in the same books. The turnip here is doing structural work: cheap, firm, available all winter, and pale enough to set off green asparagus tips, which at the time were a luxury of late spring or came from a tin. The pairing also reflects how salads were then conceived, less as a tossed mixture than as an assembled plate of cooked vegetables under a dressing.