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Turnips, Mashed
Peel the turnips, cut them in slices, and lay them in cold water for one-half hour; then place them in a stewpan, pour boiling water over them, and boil slowly until tender, at least forty-five minutes being required. Drain well, and mash the turnips in the stewpan; stand the pan ten minutes uncovered on the back of the range to dry the turnips well, stirring them frequently. Season with butter, salt and pepper. Turnips require more pepper than any other vegetable.
MUSHROOMS-To prepare mushrooms for cooking cut off the stalks and throw them away, unless they are very solid and tender, when they may be cooked. Pare the cups and drop them into a bowl of water, in which is the juice of one-half lemon to keep them from darkening.
A straightforward method whose whole success rests on one step most cooks skip. Note also that the paragraph on mushrooms is a stray fragment from the next entry and has nothing to do with the turnips.
- Dry the mash, don't skip itTurnips are roughly 90 percent water, and mashed straight from the pot they turn to soup. The ten minutes uncovered over low heat, stirring, is the hinge of the recipe: it drives off steam and concentrates the flavour before any butter goes in.
- "Back of the range"On a coal or wood range the rear of the top plate was generally the coolest zone. Use the lowest setting on a burner, or a very low oven, for the same ten minutes.
- Which turnipSome American books of this period use "turnip" loosely for both the white summer turnip and the large yellow rutabaga or swede, though many list the two separately. Sliced white turnips will often be tender well before forty-five minutes; the long time given may reflect a denser root, or simply the era's habit of long boiling. Judge by a knife tip rather than the clock.
- The cold-water soakHalf an hour in cold water was thought to draw out strong or bitter flavour from field-stored roots. With modern market turnips it is optional, though it does no harm and rinses off grit.
- Seasoning amountsNo quantities are given. For about 2 lb of peeled turnip, 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of salt and a genuinely heavy hand with black pepper are in keeping. The remark about pepper is sound advice, not hyperbole: turnip flavour flattens without it.
- YieldTwo pounds of turnips, peeled, gives about four side-dish servings.
- On the mushroom notePeeling mushroom caps made sense for field mushrooms with tough, dirty skins. Cultivated button and cremini mushrooms need only a wipe, and they should not sit in water at all, acidulated or otherwise, since they absorb it and refuse to brown. The stalks of cultivated mushrooms are perfectly good; keep them.
Turnips were the ballast of the northern vegetable garden long before potatoes displaced them, storing all winter in a cellar or clamp and turning up on the table from November to April. That reliability is also why they had a reputation to overcome: nineteenth-century cookery writing returns repeatedly to draining, drying and seasoning them hard, precisely because a watery, under-peppered turnip was the dish everyone remembered badly. The instruction to pare mushroom caps and hold them in lemon water belongs to a time when mushrooms were more likely to come from a field or a damp cellar bed than a shrink-wrapped tray, and needed both the skin removed and the flesh protected from browning.