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Oyster Plant Sauce
Scrape some roots of oyster plant and put them in acidulated water. Put two tablespoonfuls of flour into a saucepan with a small quantity of salt, and stir in gradually one pint of water. Continue stirring it over the fire until boiling, then put in the oyster plant and let simmer gently until tender. When cooked strain the roots, put them in a sauceboat with some butter sauce, and serve without delay.
Oyster plant is salsify, and nearly everything in this short recipe exists to keep it from turning grey-brown the moment the peeler touches it. The flour-and-water bath is the point, not a thickened sauce.
- What oyster plant isSalsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), a long tapering pale root sold in autumn and winter at farmers' markets and some greengrocers. Black salsify, or scorzonera, works the same way and is more common in European shops. Sold weight is deceptive: allow about 1 lb of unpeeled roots for four as a side dish.
- The hinge: acidulated waterCut salsify oxidises within a minute or two of scraping. Have a bowl of cold water with the juice of a lemon or a splash of vinegar standing ready and drop each root in as it is scraped, not after the whole lot is done.
- The flour and water is a blancTwo tablespoons of flour whisked into a pint of water is the classic blanc, a cooking liquor used for salsify, cardoons and artichoke bottoms. The flour clouds the water and keeps air off the surface of the roots so they stay ivory. It is not meant to thicken into a sauce and it gets discarded.
- Add acid to the blanc tooOscar salts the blanc but does not acidulate it. Classical formulas for a blanc usually include lemon juice or a little vinegar along with the flour and salt; without it the roots can still darken during the simmer.
- Cut and timingCut the scraped roots into two- or three-inch lengths so they cook evenly. Gentle simmering usually takes something in the region of 20 to 40 minutes depending on thickness; test with a knife tip, which should meet no resistance. Salsify can go from firm to woolly without much warning, so start checking early.
- "Butter sauce"In a Waldorf-era kitchen this means sauce au beurre, a light flour-thickened white sauce finished with a generous amount of butter and a squeeze of lemon, sometimes with an egg yolk. It is not simply melted butter, though melted butter with lemon and parsley makes a reasonable substitute.
- Serve without delayThe instruction is literal. Drained salsify continues to dull as it stands, and the sauce breaks or skins over. Have the sauceboat warm and the roots drained at the last moment.
Salsify earned its American names by an association often said to rest on a faint shellfish note in the boiled root, which cooks called oyster plant or vegetable oyster, and it was sometimes mashed into patties and fried to stand in for oyster fritters. It was a standard kitchen-garden crop through the nineteenth century, which is why it appears without explanation in a book like this one, and why the recipe assumes the reader already knows what a scraped root looks like. Its near-disappearance from American markets in the twentieth century has more to do with the labour of peeling a thin, sticky, quick-browning root than with any failing of flavour. The blanc technique Oscar uses here is standard French professional practice, and it survives in classical practice essentially unchanged.