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Turnips in Cream
8 turnips
4 tablespoons butter or other
2 cups milk fat
4 tablespoons flour
Salt and pepper
Pare the turnips, cut them in small pieces, cook until tender. Make a white sauce of the flour, fat, milk and seasonings. Pour sauce over turnips and serve.
SALADS AND SALAD DRESSINGS
A plain creamed vegetable of the sort that filled out a winter dinner. The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column typesetting: it reads 4 tablespoons butter or other fat, 2 cups milk, 4 tablespoons flour, salt and pepper.
- Turnip sizeThe recipe gives no size; eight turnips of the small white kind would come to roughly 2 lb, which suits the quantity of sauce. Rutabaga (swede) will substitute, though it is sweeter and coarser and wants a few minutes longer.
- Cooking the turnipsCut in 3/4-inch dice and boil in well-salted water 8 to 12 minutes, until a knife slides in with no resistance. Turnips go from firm to waterlogged quickly, so test early.
- Drain thoroughlyThis is the hinge. Turnips hold a great deal of water, and any that clings to them will thin the sauce into milk. Drain them and let them steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before saucing.
- The sauce ratioFour tablespoons each of fat and flour to 2 cups milk is a medium white sauce, two tablespoons of flour to the cup, the standard proportion for saucing vegetables. Cook the roux two minutes without colouring, add the milk gradually, and simmer three or four minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- "Other fat"At the time that meant lard, beef drippings, or one of the newer vegetable shortenings, all cheaper than butter. Butter is the only one worth using here; the sauce has nothing else in it to carry flavour.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg. The recipe gives no acid, and a few drops of lemon juice or a teaspoon of mustard at the end keeps the dish from tasting flat.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish, depending on the size of the turnips. It can be turned into a buttered gratin dish, topped with crumbs, and browned at 400F for 15 minutes if you want it to hold.
Turnips were the cheap, storable root of the northern winter cellar long before potatoes displaced them, and creaming was often said to be a common American way of making a bland stored vegetable palatable at table. The recipe is really an application of white sauce, which occupies a foundational place in books of this era: one flour-and-milk sauce could be poured over whatever the season offered, from onions to codfish to hard-boiled eggs. The listing of "butter or other fat" suggests that substitution was treated as a routine assumption rather than an apology.