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Turnips with Cream
Procure some nice tender turnips and boil then in salted water; when done, turn them onto a sieve and allow them to drain well. Put one ounce of butter into a stewpan with one-half tablespoonful of flour and mix thoroughly over the fire with one-half teacupful of cream and one-half teacupful of milk. Season to taste with salt, pepper and a small quantity of grated nutmeg, put in the turnips and then simmer gently at the side of the fire for fifteen minutes. Put them on a hot dish, pour their sauce over, and serve.
A plain buttered-turnip dish thickened with a very light roux. The only real technique is drying the boiled turnips well before they go into the sauce, or the cream thins out into turnip water.
- TeacupfulA period teacup is smaller than a modern measuring cup; sources vary, some reckoning it a gill (4 fl oz), others nearer 6. On that basis half a teacupful each of cream and milk is roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup each, so somewhere around 1/2 to 2/3 cup of liquid in total.
- The turnips themselves"Nice tender" means young turnips, no bigger than a tennis ball; large storage turnips turn bitter and woody and need peeling deeply. Peel and cut into even 1-inch pieces or thick slices so they cook uniformly, and boil only until a knife slides in with slight resistance.
- Drain hardThis is the hinge. Turnips hold a great deal of water, and if they go into the pan wet the sauce breaks down into something watery and grey. After draining on the sieve, let them steam dry for a few minutes, or return them briefly to the empty hot pot.
- Half a tablespoon of flourThat is a deliberately thin binding, not a béchamel. Cook the butter and flour together a minute before adding the dairy so it does not taste pasty, then whisk in the milk and cream off the direct heat to keep it smooth.
- "At the side of the fire"On a coal range, the cooler edge of the top plate: a bare simmer. On a modern burner use the lowest setting, and stir now and then, since a flour-thickened cream sauce will catch on a thin pan bottom.
- Fifteen minutesReasonable here, because the point is to let the turnips absorb the sauce and soften fully rather than to cook them from raw. If they were already fully tender from boiling, ten minutes is enough before they begin to fall apart.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and keep it to a pinch or two. It is doing the same work it does in creamed spinach or onions, cutting the sweetness of the dairy; pre-ground nutmeg goes dusty and dominates.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight of turnips; judging from the one ounce of butter and the small quantity of dairy, something on the order of 1 1/2 pounds of trimmed turnips would suit, serving about four as a side. Serve it straight from the heat in a warmed dish, as the sauce dulls and skins over as it cools.
Turnips were an everyday winter root of the nineteenth-century American and European table, cheap enough to be fed to livestock, and hotel cookery often dressed them in cream. The treatment here is a thin béchamel poured over a boiled vegetable, with nutmeg a common seasoning for anything bound with milk. Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is less a collection of signature creations than a working compendium of what a large hotel brigade actually turned out, vegetable sides included. Instructions like "simmer gently at the side of the fire" assume a coal or wood range with hot and cool zones across its top, where moving a pan a few inches served as heat control.