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Mashed Turnip
Wash and pare turnips, cut in slices or quarters, and cook in boiling salted water until soft. Drain, mash, and season with butter, salt, and pepper.
A three-line recipe that depends almost entirely on choosing the right root and getting the water out of it. The instruction that matters is the draining.
- Which turnipThe recipe says only "turnip," which in older New England usage could mean either the small white turnip or the yellow rutabaga, also called Swede or yellow turnip. White turnips cook faster, roughly 15-20 minutes, and mash pale and loose; rutabaga needs longer, roughly 25-35 minutes, and gives a denser, sweeter, orange mash.
- Pare deeplyTurnips carry a fibrous layer under the skin that stays coarse long after the flesh is soft. Take off more than a vegetable peeler removes, particularly on rutabaga, which also often arrives waxed.
- Uniform piecesQuarters of a large rutabaga will not cook evenly. Cut everything to roughly 1 to 1.5 inches so the outside is not disintegrating while the center is still hard.
- The drying stepTurnip holds far more water than potato, and a wet mash is the usual failure. After draining, return the pieces to the dry pan over low heat for two or three minutes, shaking, until the surfaces look dull, then mash.
- Seasoning quantitiesThe original gives none. For 2 lb of prepared turnip, start with 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of salt and a generous grind of pepper; a pinch of sugar or a spoonful of cream is a frequent addition.
- TextureUse a masher or a ricer, not a food processor. Turnip does not turn gluey the way potato does, but a machine will whip air and water into it and thin the result.
- Yield2 lb of turnip as bought gives roughly 3 cups mashed, serving four as a side. (Note this is untrimmed weight, not the prepared weight used for the seasoning amounts above.)
Turnips and rutabagas were the cellar vegetables of the northern winter, cheap, enormously productive, and keeping for months in sand or straw long after the last of the summer produce was gone. That is why a book like Farmer's treats mashed turnip as a matter of two sentences: nobody in 1896 needed to be told what to do with a turnip, only reminded. The vegetable's low standing is old news too, being fodder as much as food in much of Europe, and mashing with butter was one familiar way of making it palatable at table. The rutabaga itself is generally traced to a cross between turnip and cabbage arising in northern Europe, and its Scandinavian associations survive in the American names Swede and Swedish turnip.