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Creamed Turnip
Wash turnips, and cut in one-half inch cubes. Cook three cups cubes in boiling salted water twenty minutes, or until soft. Drain, and add one cup White Sauce I.
A plain vegetable dish that depends entirely on two things the original leaves unstated: which turnip you buy, and how dry you get it before the sauce goes on.
- White Sauce IThe book's White Sauce I is a butter-flour-milk sauce, roughly equal spoon measures of butter and flour to a cup of milk, with salt and pepper; check the book's own figures for the edition in hand. Melt the butter, cook the flour in it briefly without colouring, then add the milk gradually and cook until it thickens.
- Which turnip"Turnip" here most likely means the small white turnip rather than the yellow rutabaga, which the period called Swede or yellow turnip; the recipe itself does not say. Rutabaga works but is denser and sweeter and will want noticeably longer cooking.
- Drain hardThe hinge of the dish. Turnip holds a great deal of water, and cubes that go into the sauce wet will thin it to milk within a minute. Drain, then return the cubes to the dry hot pan for half a minute to steam off.
- Twenty minutes is a maximumHalf-inch cubes of young white turnip are usually tender in 10-12 minutes. Twenty minutes suits older, coarser roots; test with a knife tip rather than the clock or the cubes will collapse into the sauce.
- Peel or notThe recipe says only to wash. Young spring turnips with thin skins need nothing more; storage turnips have a tough fibrous layer under the skin that should be pared away generously.
- QuantityThree cups of cubes is roughly 1 lb of trimmed turnip, and with a cup of sauce serves four as a side.
- SeasoningThe white sauce is bland on its own. A grating of nutmeg, a good deal of black pepper, or a spoonful of the turnip cooking water stirred back in all lift it without departing from the method.
Creamed vegetables run through the whole of the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book as a system rather than a set of separate dishes: Fannie Farmer gives graded white sauces—White Sauce I and II—and then applies them, by cross-reference, to boiled vegetables. A cook who had mastered the butter-flour-milk proportion could dress any boiled vegetable on the table, and the recipe need be no longer than three sentences. Turnip itself was a winter storage staple in New England kitchens, cheap and abundant from autumn root cellars, and its slight bitterness and watery texture were the sort of faults a milk sauce was often said to soften. The habit of numbering sauces by thickness rather than naming them was one of the features that made the book feel like a manual instead of a collection.