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Mashed Turnip Tops
Thoroughly wash and pick over a quantity of turnip tops, place them in a saucepan of boiling water and boil them until they are tender. Turn the greens onto a fine sieve, press them well to extract all the water, and when almost dry rub them through the sieve. Put one tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan together with one tablespoonful of flour and stir them over the fire until well mixed; then throw in the turnip tops, moisten with a very little clear gravy and season to taste with pepper and salt Stir the puree over the fire until very hot, then turn it onto a dish, garnish it with sippets of toast, and serve.
A plain vegetable purée built on a white roux, in the French manner Oscar's kitchen applied to almost everything green. The recipe assumes you know how to make a roux and how much greens shrink.
- How much to buy"A quantity" is no guide: turnip tops cook down dramatically, losing most of their raw bulk. Roughly two pounds of trimmed greens should give something over a cup of purée, enough for about four as a side dish.
- Boiling timeYoung turnip tops are tender in 5 to 10 minutes in well-salted water; older, coarser leaves may want 15. Nineteenth-century directions to boil greens "until tender" could run considerably longer, at the cost of both colour and flavour.
- Pressing dryThis is the hinge. Greens hold an astonishing amount of water, and any that survives will thin the purée into soup. Press hard in a sieve, or wring the cooked greens in a clean towel.
- Rubbing through the sieveA food processor does this in seconds; pulse rather than run it, or the texture turns to paste. Stems that resist should be discarded rather than forced through.
- Clear gravyIn period usage this means an unthickened meat broth rather than a thickened brown sauce. Ordinary low-salt chicken or veal stock works; use a scant quarter cup, added a spoonful at a time.
- The rouxCook the butter and flour together two or three minutes over moderate heat before the greens go in, just long enough to lose the raw flour taste without colouring.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast, arranged round the edge of the dish. Trim the crusts and cut them the same size if you want the period look.
Turnip tops — the leafy greens of the root, sold today as turnip greens — were a cheap spring vegetable long before they were a restaurant dish, and treating them this way is a piece of deliberate translation. The technique is the French purée d'épinards: boil, drain hard, sieve, then bind with a butter-and-flour roux loosened with stock. Oscar Tschirky's kitchen at the Waldorf ran on that vocabulary, and his book applies it across the board, so a plain boiled green arrives at the table as a smooth purée with toast points round the rim. The garnish of sippets is older still; the word is generally traced to the sixteenth century and appears throughout English cookery for small pieces of toast served with anything soft or saucy.