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Boiled Radishes
Wash large and strongly flavored radishes and trim at both ends. Boil until tender. Pour off some of the water in which they have been boiled and thicken the remainder with a little cornstarch blended with milk. Season with salt, paprika and butter. The flavor is not unlike spicy turnips and they make a pleasant novelty, served with steak or chops.
A short, unfussy way to use radishes that have grown too large and hot to eat raw. The method is sound; the only real variables are size and cooking time.
- Choose the right radishesThis is written for overgrown, woody, sharply pungent roots — the ones left too long in the ground. Small salad radishes work but turn insipid; if using them, halve the cooking time.
- Trim and sizeCut off the root tail and the leaf crown. Large radishes should be halved or quartered so the pieces cook evenly; whole ones the size of a golf ball take noticeably longer at the centre.
- Timing"Boil until tender" means about 10 to 15 minutes in salted water for quartered large radishes, 6 to 8 for small whole ones. Test with a knife tip — they should give like a cooked turnip, not collapse.
- Cooking mellows the heatThe mustard-oil compounds that make radishes sharp are volatile and break down with heat, so boiling takes much of the bite off. Leaving the pan uncovered helps; the cooking water will smell strongly and is not worth saving for stock.
- The sauceBlend the cornstarch smooth with cold milk before it goes near the hot liquid, or it will lump. Roughly 1 to 2 teaspoons cornstarch blended with 1/4 cup milk will lightly thicken about a cup of retained cooking water; simmer a minute or two to lose the raw starch taste.
- SeasoningThe paprika called for was most likely the mild sweet sort then usual in American kitchens, used as much for colour as flavour. Add the butter off the heat so the sauce stays glossy.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; as a guide, a bunch of large radishes, roughly 1 lb trimmed, will serve three or four as a side.
Radishes appear in American cookbooks of this era largely as a raw relish — served whole on ice with salt, alongside celery and olives — so a cooked radish fits the "pleasant novelty" the text claims. The recipe reads as a thrift measure: radishes bolt and turn woody and fiery quickly in warm weather, and a home gardener or market cook faced with a glut had few other uses for them. The comparison to turnips is apt, since both belong to the cabbage family and both owe their sharpness to the same family of mustard-oil compounds, which break down with heat. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in 1911 as part of a broader library of domestic manuals aimed at the middle-class housekeeper, and this kind of small economy — plus the suggestion of a hot vegetable to accompany steak or chops — is very much its register.