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Boiled Turnip Tops
Wash thoroughly and pick over a quantity of turnip tops and drain them well. Plunge them in a good supply of fast-boiling water with a small quantity of salt in it and let them boil for twenty or twenty-five minutes. Drain them well and serve either plain or chopped fine, mixed with salt, pepper and a small quantity of butter.
A plain boiled green, and the only real decision is how long you leave it in the pot. Everything else is seasoning.
- What turnip tops areThe leafy greens cut from turnip roots, sold today as turnip greens and usually in bunches or bagged. Look for firm, deep-green leaves; the yellowing outer ones and any thick woody stems should be stripped off during the picking-over.
- The twenty-five minutesThat timing suits the coarse, mature tops a kitchen of the period received from the market. Young bunched greens collapse in 10 to 15 minutes and turn grey and flat beyond that. Taste a leaf at ten minutes and judge from there; older, thicker leaves may genuinely want the full twenty.
- A good supply of fast-boiling waterThe point is volume, so the greens do not drop the water off the boil. Use at least four quarts for a couple of pounds of greens, salted to about a tablespoon per gallon, and add the leaves in handfuls so it recovers quickly. Leaving the pot uncovered helps keep the colour.
- DrainingTurnip greens hold a surprising amount of water. Press them in the colander or lift them out with tongs and let them sit a minute, or the butter will slide off into a puddle at the bottom of the dish.
- Chopped fineChopping on a board after draining, then returning the greens to the warm pan with the butter, gives a better result than dressing them whole. Add the pepper at this stage rather than to the cooking water.
- YieldGreens lose most of their bulk. Two pounds of untrimmed tops serves about four as a side dish.
- Where the bitterness goesTurnip tops are more bitter than spinach or chard, and boiling in plenty of water is the traditional means of moderating it. A splash of vinegar or lemon at the table, or a piece of bacon in the pot, are the usual American accompaniments and are entirely in keeping with the dish.
Turnip tops belong to the long European habit of eating the whole plant: the root stored through winter, the greens taken young in spring or from the second growth. They were a staple green in Britain and Ireland and travelled to America early, where they became central to Southern cooking, boiled with salt pork and served with the resulting pot liquor. Their appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book, among the terrapin and the sauces, is a reminder that even a hotel kitchen as grand as the Waldorf's needed a repertoire of plain boiled vegetables to send up alongside the roasts, and that the printed recipe for such things is usually only three lines long.