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Mashed Turnips
Peel the turnips, wash them, cut them into thin slices, put them in a steamer over a saucepan of boiling water and steam them for about an hour, or until they are quite tender; then mash them with a small quantity of milk, seasoning with salt and pepper.
A plain vegetable side from the Waldorf's kitchen, and the sort of thing that fails only on moisture. Everything else here is straightforward.
- Dry the mash, not just the turnipTurnips hold far more water than potatoes. After steaming, let the slices sit in the colander a few minutes, then return the mash to a dry pan over low heat and stir until the steam stops rising before adding milk. Skip this and you get soup.
- Which turnipIn American kitchens of this period "turnip" generally meant the white or purple-top turnip rather than the yellow swede. Swede works and is sweeter, but wants longer cooking and mashes to a darker, looser purée.
- The hour is too longThin slices are usually tender in a steamer well before an hour; start checking at 15 to 20 minutes. The recipe's own test is "until they are quite tender", and steaming to the full hour leaves them waterlogged.
- Boiling insteadSteaming is the better method precisely because it keeps water out. If you boil, use well-salted water, drain hard, and dry the mash in the pan as above.
- Milk and butterWarm the milk before it goes in, and add it a spoonful at a time — turnip needs much less liquid than potato. A generous knob of butter does more for the flavour than extra milk does.
- SeasoningSalt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg suit it; a pinch of sugar tames the sulphurous edge of an older, larger root. Young turnips need none of that.
- YieldRoughly 2 lb of peeled turnip serves four as a side dish. Peel generously — the outer layer under the skin is fibrous and will not break down.
Mashed turnips suit a book of hotel cookery for the same reason they were common on American tables of the period: the turnip stored through winter in a root cellar without fuss, and in the years before refrigerated freight it was one of the few vegetables a hotel could count on in February. The distinction between the white turnip and the yellow Swedish turnip, or rutabaga — a name traced to the Swedish dialect word rotabagge, in which the first element is "root" — was clearer to nineteenth-century cooks and market gardeners than it is on most supermarket signage today, and old recipes that simply say "turnips" commonly mean the white kind.