Home › Vegetables › Creamed Kohlrabi
Creamed Kohlrabi
6 kohlrabies
Salt
2 tablespoons butter or savory Paprika fat
2 cups milk
2 tablespoons flour
1 egg-yolk
Wash and pare the kohlrabies. Cut into half-inch cubes, drop into boiling water to cover and cook until tender. Just before cooking is completed, add salt, then drain and shake over the fire to dry slightly. Make a white sauce from the flour, fat, milk and seasonings, adding the egg-yolk last, and pour it over the vegetable.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original's two-column layout; read it as six kohlrabies, 2 tablespoons butter or savory fat, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk, 1 egg yolk, salt and paprika.
- The hinge: the egg yolkBeat the yolk with a little of the hot sauce first, then stir it back in off the heat. Added straight into a simmering sauce it scrambles into threads, and the sauce cannot be brought back to a boil afterward without curdling.
- Choosing kohlrabiLook for bulbs no larger than a tennis ball. Anything bigger has a woody core and a fibrous skin that resists paring; six small bulbs is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb trimmed.
- Pare deeplyKohlrabi has a tough layer under the skin that stays stringy no matter how long it cooks. Take it off with a knife rather than a peeler, and cut away the fibrous base where the stems join.
- "Savory fat"Likely period shorthand for rendered bacon, ham or poultry fat. Butter is the straightforward substitute; bacon fat would give the dish a smoky note.
- Cooking timeHalf-inch cubes of young kohlrabi are tender in 8 to 12 minutes. Older bulbs can take 20 or more, and are worth testing early rather than trusting a clock.
- Salt at the endThe recipe adds salt only just before the cubes finish cooking. Drain well and dry the cubes over low heat, or the retained water will thin the sauce.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons each of flour and fat to 2 cups milk gives a thin pouring sauce by modern standards. If you want it to cling to the cubes, use 3 tablespoons of each, or simmer the roux-thickened milk a few minutes longer before the yolk goes in.
- YieldServes six as a side dish. The paprika may be stirred into the sauce with the other seasonings, or dusted over the sauced vegetable.
Kohlrabi takes its name from German — Kohl (cabbage) and Rabi (turnip), generally traced through the Italian cavolo rapa — and the plant is neither, but a swollen stem of Brassica oleracea, the same species as cabbage, broccoli and kale. It was a common kitchen-garden crop in German-speaking Europe by the sixteenth century and traveled to American gardens largely with German and Central European immigrants, and it turns up in early twentieth-century American household manuals as a vegetable needing introduction rather than one everybody knew. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published this and similar compilations as part of a broad domestic-advice business aimed at the same subscribers who bought its magazines, and creaming a vegetable in a flour-thickened white sauce was a common American treatment of the period for boiled vegetables.