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Oyster-Plant Sauted
Scrape a large bunch of fine oyster plant, plunge it into cold water containing two tablespoonfuls of vinegar so as to prevent it turning black, take it from the water, drain and cut it lengthwise into two-inch pieces. Place them in a saucepan with two tablespoonfuls each of vinegar and flour, mix well, cover with plenty of cold water, add a handful of salt, cover and let boil slowly for forty minutes. Then drain, put them into a sautepan with one and one-half ounces of butter, and season with a little pepper, the juice of half a lemon, and one teaspoonful of chopped parsley. Heat well for five minutes, stirring occasionally, then place them in a deep hot dish and serve.
Oyster plant is salsify, a long tapering white root that oxidizes almost the instant it is peeled. Everything in the first half of this recipe exists to keep it pale; the second half is a straightforward butter saute.
- Oyster plant is salsifyLook for salsify or its near relative scorzonera (black-skinned, white-fleshed) at farmers' markets and specialty greengrocers in autumn and winter. A "large bunch" is not specified further; a couple of pounds of untrimmed roots would be a fair modern reading.
- The acidulated water is not optionalCut surfaces brown within a minute or two, so keep a bowl of cold water with the vinegar beside the board and drop each piece in as it is scraped. The roots also leak a sticky white latex; gloves save some scrubbing.
- Flour and vinegar make a blancSimmering in water slackened with flour and acid is the classic French treatment for white vegetables such as salsify, cardoons and artichoke bottoms. The flour clouds the water and keeps air off the surface; the acid holds the color.
- A handful of saltSalsify cooks in a great deal of water, so the quantity is less alarming than it reads. About 1 tablespoon per quart is a reasonable modern reading, and the roots are drained before the butter goes on.
- Forty minutes is an upper boundOlder, thicker field-grown roots may want the full time, but slender young salsify is tender at 20 to 25 minutes. Test with a knife tip from about the twenty-minute mark; overcooked salsify collapses into fibers.
- Cut after peeling, not beforeScrape the whole root, then cut into two-inch lengths as directed. Halve or quarter any thick pieces lengthwise so everything cooks evenly.
- The finishOne and a half ounces of butter is 3 tablespoons. Get the drained pieces properly dry before they go into the pan. Note that the recipe adds the pepper, lemon juice and parsley with the butter at the start of the five minutes, not at the end.
Salsify earned the name "oyster plant" from a supposed resemblance in flavor to the bivalve, a comparison recorded well before Oscar Tschirky's day and always more suggestive than exact. The root was a standard American kitchen-garden crop through the nineteenth century, appearing in seed catalogues and household manuals as a reliable winter vegetable, and it turns up in hotel cookery of the period fried in batter, in mock oyster fritters, in cream, and as here simply boiled and sauted. Its near disappearance from American markets is often put down to labor rather than taste: peeling a bunch of thin, sap-oozing roots is tedious work of the sort a Waldorf kitchen brigade could absorb and a modern household cook generally will not.