Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Stewed Turnips with Sugar
Stewed Turnips with Sugar
Procure a number of young turnips as nearly of one size as possible, put them in a saucepan with a lump of butter and fry them until they are well browned. Sprinkle some powdered sugar over them, season with a small quantity of salt, pour in one teacupful of stock more or less according to the quantity of the turnips, place the cover on the saucepan, and let them simmer gently until they are tender. When cooked turn the turnips onto a hot dish, and serve.
A glazed-turnip method: brown in fat, sugar, a splash of stock, cook covered until the liquid reduces to a syrup. The whole thing hinges on the liquid being scant enough to concentrate rather than boil the turnips.
- Turnip size"Young turnips" means the small white-and-purple globes, roughly golf-ball size, sweet rather than woody. Anything over about 2 inches across should be peeled and quartered so the pieces cook at the same rate as one another.
- A teacupfulPeriod teacup measures are not standardised; a teacupful is usually reckoned somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, less than a modern measuring cup. Oscar's "more or less" is the real instruction: add enough to come a third of the way up the turnips and no more.
- A lump of butterRead this as 2 to 3 tablespoons for about 1 1/2 lb of turnips. Enough to coat and brown, not enough to pool.
- Sugar timingPowdered (that is, superfine) sugar over already-browned turnips will catch quickly. A tablespoon is plenty; toss it through off the heat, then add the stock, or the sugar scorches before the liquid arrives.
- Browning firstTurnips hold a lot of water and will steam rather than brown if the pan is crowded or the heat is low. Work in a single layer over medium-high heat, in two batches if necessary; the browning is where most of the flavour comes from.
- Finishing the glazeOnce tender, about 15-20 minutes for small whole turnips, uncover and let the remaining liquid reduce to a shining syrup, rolling the turnips in it. The recipe stops short of saying so, but this is what turns a stew into the dish.
- Yield1 1/2 lb of turnips serves four as a side, alongside roast meat or game.
Sugar-glazed root vegetables belong to the French repertoire that shaped American hotel cooking in Oscar Tschirky's era; the technique is essentially navets glac\this book because the Waldorf's kitchen ran on classic French garnitures for roasts and game. Turnips were cheap, kept well through winter, and are often said to have been thought of in nineteenth-century American cooking as coarse fare in need of improvement, which may be why sugar and butter show up so often in period turnip recipes. The pairing with duck and mutton is older still, and is usually explained by the turnip's slight bitterness cutting fat that fruit sauces only sweeten. Oscar, who was the Waldorf's ma tre d'h tel rather than its chef, compiled these entries as a record of the house's working repertoire, and the terse, quantity-free style here is characteristic of a book written for people who already knew how to cook.