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Turnips in Cream
Peel the turnips, cut them in small pieces, and boil until tender. Drain, add milk to nearly cover, and when the milk boils, thicken it to a cream with a little flour, stirred to a paste with cold milk. Add butter, salt and pepper, boil two minutes, and serve.
A plain white-sauce vegetable dish built in one pan, with no quantities given at all. The proportions below are the ones that make it behave.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. For 2 lb of turnips, figure about 1 cup milk and 1 tablespoon flour slaked in 2 tablespoons cold milk, plus 2 tablespoons butter. Serves four to six as a side.
- Which turnipThe recipe says only 'turnips'; in period American usage that ordinarily meant the white or purple-top turnip, with rutabaga called Swede turnip and treated separately. Rutabaga is sweeter and takes longer, so if you use it allow more time. Cut to even 3/4-inch pieces so they finish together.
- Salt the boiling waterThe recipe salts only at the end. Turnip boiled in plain water tastes flat all the way through; salt the water and the seasoning at the finish becomes a correction rather than the whole flavor.
- Drain hardTurnips hold a lot of water and will thin the sauce as they sit. Let them steam dry in the empty hot pan for a minute before the milk goes in.
- The flour pasteStir the flour into cold milk until completely smooth, then add it to the boiling milk in a stream while stirring. Added dry, or into hot milk, it lumps immediately.
- Boil two minutesThis is not a suggestion to hurry past. Flour thickened for less than that keeps a raw, pasty taste; two minutes of actual bubbling with stirring cooks it out and sets the final thickness.
- Butter lastThe recipe adds the butter with the salt and pepper before the two-minute boil. If you prefer, add it off the heat or in the final seconds so it blends in smoothly rather than sitting on the surface.
- SeasoningThe recipe says only 'pepper'; white pepper is often preferred in a white sauce so as not to speck it, and a grating of nutmeg is a common companion to creamed root vegetables if you want it.
Creaming was a common American treatment for a boiled vegetable in the decades on either side of 1900: boil, drain, blanket in a thin flour-thickened milk sauce. Here the flour is slaked in cold milk rather than cooked in butter as a roux, which is the simpler household version of the method. Turnips were a winter storage vegetable, cellared and eaten well into spring, and a cream sauce softens a root that turns sharp and fibrous as it ages. The absence of stated amounts is common in cookbooks of the period, where a printed line often served as a reminder to a cook who already knew the proportions.