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Oyster Plant Pudding
2 eggs
1 tablespoon butter
4 cups oyster plant, grated or 1 tablespoon flour chopped very fine
½ cup milk
Season to taste
Beat the eggs thoroughly; add the oyster plant, melted butter and seasoning. Stir the flour in two tablespoons of milk until perfectly smooth, then add to the other mixture; blend thoroughly.
Pour into a buttered baking dish and bake in a slow oven for one hour.
Other vegetables, such as carrots, parsnips and sweet potatoes, may be used in place of oyster plant.
A plain vegetable custard, of a type that filled the middle of many turn-of-the-century menus. The ingredient list is garbled by the two-column typesetting, so read it as two eggs, one tablespoon butter, one tablespoon flour, four cups grated or finely chopped oyster plant, half a cup of milk, and seasoning.
- Oyster plant is salsifyThe name refers to Tragopogon porrifolius, a long pale root said to taste faintly of oysters when cooked. Look for salsify or its black-skinned relative scorzonera at farmers' markets; parsnip is the closest common substitute and the recipe itself sanctions it.
- The root discolours fastCut or grated salsify browns within minutes, like an apple. Drop it into water with a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar as you work, then drain well before mixing, or the pudding turns grey.
- Raw or cooked rootThe instructions imply raw grated root going straight into the custard, which needs the full hour to soften. Parboiling the salsify until just tender first gives a more even texture and a sweeter flavour.
- Slow ovenPeriod usage varies, but a slow oven is generally taken as somewhere around 300F, possibly lower. A custard bound with only two eggs is liable to curdle and weep if pushed hotter; a water bath is worth the trouble if your oven runs uneven.
- Only half a cup of milkTwo tablespoons go to slacken the flour; the recipe never says what to do with the rest, though presumably it joins the mix. Four cups of vegetable to half a cup of liquid makes a dense, sliceable pudding rather than a pourable custard.
- Season to tasteSalt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg suit it. Salsify is mild to the point of blandness, so season more assertively than the quantity of vegetable suggests.
- YieldRoughly a 1½-quart dish, serving four to six as a side. It is done when the centre is set and a knife comes out clean.
Salsify was a standard kitchen-garden root in Britain and North America through the nineteenth century, valued as much for keeping well in the ground over winter as for flavour, and it was often sold and cooked under the name oyster plant — a resemblance generally described as faint even by cooks who liked it. Puddings of this kind, in which a grated vegetable is bound with egg, a spoonful of flour and a little milk and baked slowly, were one way of making a substantial dish out of a cheap root, and the recipe's closing note that carrots, parsnips or sweet potatoes will serve equally shows the formula was understood as a method rather than a specific dish.