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Salsify, or Oyster Plant
After washing and scraping white the salsify, keeping it under water as much as possible while doing it, throw it into weak lemon juice and water or vinegar and water for a few minutes to blanch. Drain carefully and cover with boiling water. Cook about forty minutes, adding a teaspoon of salt and a squeeze of lemon after the first twenty minutes. When tender, drain well, cut into short lengths, put into pan with white or cream sauce, shake over fire until very hot, and serve.
A simple boil-and-sauce treatment of a root that most cooks now meet only at a farmers' market. The whole procedure turns on keeping the peeled root away from air.
- Why the acidulated waterSalsify oxidises to a dull grey-brown within a minute or two of scraping. A bowl of water with a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar, ready before you start, is the hinge of the recipe rather than an optional refinement.
- "Blanch" hereAs used in this recipe, blanch means to whiten, not to parboil. The acid soak is only to preserve colour; the actual cooking happens afterwards in fresh boiling water.
- Cooking timeForty minutes suits thick winter roots cooked whole, as here. Modern market salsify is often slender; test at 20 to 25 minutes with the point of a knife and stop when it yields easily, as overcooked salsify turns watery.
- Scraping versus peelingThe skin is thin and the sap is sticky. A vegetable peeler works, but the roots can also be boiled unpeeled and the skins slipped off after, which loses less flesh.
- QuantityNo amount is given. Reckon about 1 1/2 lb of untrimmed roots for four people, which yields roughly a pound trimmed.
- The sauceA white or cream sauce of the period means a roux of 2 tablespoons each butter and flour with a cup of milk or thin cream, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg if you like. Have it made and warm before the salsify is drained.
- FinishingShaking the pan over the fire is meant to coat the pieces without breaking them; do not stir with a spoon. A minute of gentle heat is enough.
- ScorzoneraBlack salsify, sold under that name or as scorzonera, is a different plant but behaves the same way and can be substituted directly.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) is a Mediterranean root that reached American kitchen gardens by way of England and was grown widely through the nineteenth century, when it kept well in a cellar or left in the ground over winter. The common name "oyster plant" is conventionally traced to a faint resemblance in flavour to oysters, and the comparison was taken seriously enough that period cookbooks sometimes mashed the boiled root, bound it with egg and crumbs, and fried it as mock oyster fritters. Its appearance in nineteenth-century household books is a reminder of how much narrower the winter root selection has become; salsify largely dropped out of American markets during the twentieth century and has only recently returned as a specialty crop.