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Boiled Oyster-Plant
Scrape a bunch of tender oyster-plant, putting the roots as they have been scraped in cold water to which a little vinegar has been added. Cut them in pieces, put them in a saucepan of boiling salted water over the fire and boil until tender; then drain, add a tablespoonful of butter, cream enough to cover them and a seasoning of salt and white pepper, and serve as soon as the cream is hot. The cream may be omitted if not desired.
Oyster-Plant, Poulette Scrape a good-sized bunch of fine fresh oyster-plant, plunge it at once into acidulated water, and when well washed, drain and cut it into two-inch pieces; place them in a saucepan and boil in plenty of water, adding a little salt, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar and the same quantity of diluted flour. Cook until tender, remove, drain well, and serve with a pint of hot poulette sauce poured over them.
Two treatments of salsify, the root Oscar's kitchen called oyster-plant. Both hinge on keeping the peeled root out of the air, since it browns faster than an apple.
- What oyster-plant isSalsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), a long tapering pale root sold in autumn and winter at farmers' markets and some greengrocers. Scorzonera, the black-skinned relative, behaves the same way and can be substituted directly. A "bunch" here is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb, enough for four as a side.
- The acidulated water is not optionalCut surfaces oxidize to grey-brown within a minute or two. Have a bowl of cold water with a splash of vinegar or lemon juice ready before you start scraping, and drop each root in as it is done.
- The blanc in the second recipeThe vinegar plus "diluted flour" is a classic blanc — flour slaked in cold water and stirred into the cooking liquid to keep the roots pale, the same trick used for salsify, cardoons and artichoke bottoms. Use about a tablespoon of flour whisked smooth in a little cold water per quart of water; add it to the pot, not to the roots.
- Cooking time"Until tender" runs 15 to 25 minutes for two-inch pieces, depending on thickness and age. Test with a knife tip; salsify goes from firm to woolly quickly, so start checking at 15.
- Cream enough to coverFor 1 1/2 lb of drained root, expect to need at least a cup and a half. The recipe says to serve as soon as the cream is hot, so it is not reduced or thickened. White pepper is specified so the dish stays pale; black pepper works but looks wrong.
- Poulette sauceA velouté (butter-flour roux with light stock, here the salsify water or chicken stock) finished off the heat with egg yolks, cream and lemon juice, usually with chopped parsley. Once the yolks go in, keep it below a simmer or it will curdle. A pint is generous for one bunch; a cup and a half is closer to modern proportions.
- PeelingScrape rather than pare, as both recipes direct. A vegetable peeler is faster than a knife, and gloves save your hands from the sticky latex the cut root exudes.
Salsify's American nickname is generally traced to the faint bivalve sweetness of the cooked root, and nineteenth-century cooks leaned on the resemblance hard: mock oyster soup and salsify fritters passed as oyster fritters appear all through the period's household manuals. It was a staple kitchen-garden root in the United States from the early 1800s and still common enough in 1896, when Oscar Tschirky compiled this book, that a Waldorf reader would have needed no explanation of what a "bunch" looked like. Its decline in American cooking is usually traced to the labor of peeling and to the twentieth-century collapse of the market-garden trade in fiddly winter roots; in France, where salsifis never quite went away, the blanc and the poulette finish given here are still familiar treatments.