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Salsifis En Mayonaise
Wash the salsify roots and shave off the outside, throw them in cold water with salt in it and set them on to boil. Try with a fork to know when done. Salsify requires an hour or more to cook. After draining from the hot water put it immediately in a pan of cold to keep it of good color. 1. Cut the salsify across in round lozenge shapes as nearly of one size as possible. Put it in a bowl and pour over it the allemande salad dressing with a little Chili vinegar mixed in.
Salsify is best in the spring of the year, after it has had the winter frosts, and garden cress can then be had for garnish. Make a border of cress on the small flat dish or saucer and place a spoonful of the salsify and its dressing in the middle. 2. Cut the salsify in lengths of about 2 inches, not using the largest roots for this purpose. Place 3 or 4 of the pieces on each dish, diagonally across the dish, and pour over the pile a spoonful of thick mayonaise. It is better if the pieces of salsify can steep in oil and vinegar, enough to moisten them, awhile before dinner.
The cream hollandaise, or the other dressings, can of course be used instead of the two preceding, and salsify does well to mix in salads with other vegetables.
The making of the allemande dressin is not so simple but that it may be easily spoiled if the oil and cream be added too hastily. Probably a half cup more of cream will be needed than the receipt calls for, and it should not be ice cold nor added faster than a spoonful at a time. This dressing is valuable for needing no eggs and but little oil, and is suitable for all sorts of vegetables. "We Florentines mostly use names as we do prawns, and strip them of all flourishes before we trust them to our throats."--Romola. The prawn is a larger kind of shrimp and for the cook's purposes is the same thing. It has longer horns, feelers or flourishes than the shrimp, which causes it to be preferred for a buisson; it is of lighter color when cooked, and in the markets usually sells for a lower price than the shrimp.
A cold salsify salad served two ways, from a book that assumes you already have a stock of dressings on hand. The dressings are the difficulty, not the root.
- Salsify itselfAlso sold as oyster plant or, in a different but interchangeable species, scorzonera. Look for firm roots about the thickness of a thumb; large old ones are woody and are best kept for the sliced version rather than the batons.
- Peeling and discolorationPeeled salsify oxidises brown within minutes. The salted cold water bath in the original is doing real work; acidulate it with lemon juice or a spoonful of vinegar for a better result, and keep the pieces submerged until they go into the pot.
- The hour of boiling is too longNineteenth-century salsify was often larger and stored all winter. Trimmed modern roots are usually tender in 20 to 30 minutes, and sliced pieces sooner. Test with a knife tip early; overcooked salsify collapses into mush and cannot be sliced into lozenges.
- Cold shockDraining straight into cold water is not fussiness. It stops the cooking and holds the pale color, which matters when the whole point of the dish is neat pieces under white dressing.
- Allemande dressingAn eggless cream-and-oil dressing built by slow emulsion, from elsewhere in the book. The hinge is in the text: add cream a spoonful at a time, not ice cold, or it breaks. If you do not have that receipt, a thick mayonnaise or a hollandaise loosened with cream serves for both versions.
- Chili vinegarA vinegar steeped with hot chilli pods, once a standard sideboard bottle. A splash of red wine vinegar with a pinch of cayenne, or a few drops of a vinegar-based hot sauce, gives the same effect.
- Garden cressThe garnish is the peppery seedling cress, not watercress, though watercress or young arugula will do. It is there for bite against a rich dressing as much as for looks.
- Yield and servingBoth versions are plated individually on small flat dishes or saucers, as a first course or salad course. The recipe gives no quantities; the second version specifies only 3 or 4 pieces per dish, so scale the roots to the number of plates.
- The prawn paragraphThe closing lines on prawns and shrimp belong to a neighboring entry and have nothing to do with salsify. Ignore them here.
Salsify, Tragopogon porrifolius, was a common kitchen-garden root through the nineteenth century and largely disappeared from American markets in the twentieth; its nickname "oyster plant" is usually explained by a faint resemblance in flavor, which cooks of the period seem to have taken more seriously than most modern palates do. The advice to eat it in spring after the frosts reflects real garden practice, since cold weather converts stored starch to sugar in root crops. The method here is French in vocabulary and presentation, with its allemande and hollandaise dressings and its instructions on arranging three or four batons diagonally across a saucer. The quotation is from George Eliot's Romola, set in fifteenth-century Florence; nineteenth-century cookbook writers borrowed literary tags freely, and this one is attached to the prawn note rather than the salad.