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Salsify or Vegetable Oysters (Parboil after scraping off)
Parboil after scraping off the outside, cut in slices, dip it into a beaten egg and fine bread-crumbs, and fry in lard. Or, slice crosswise five or six good-sized plants, cook till tender in water enough to cover, then add a pint or more of rich milk mixed with one table-spoon flour, season with butter, pepper and salt, let boil up and pour over slices of toasted bread; or add three pints milk, or half milk and water, season and serve with crackers like oyster soup.
Three preparations of salsify in one entry: fried cutlets, a creamed dish on toast, and a mock oyster soup. The root is the variable here — it discolours fast and its texture depends entirely on how long you parboil it.
- Buy and store the rootSalsify is a long, pale, tapering root sold as salsify or oyster plant, often at farmers' markets in autumn and winter. Scorzonera (black salsify) works the same way. Choose firm roots without soft spots; limp ones are woody at the core.
- Acidulated water is the hingeScraped salsify browns within a minute of exposure to air. Drop the peeled slices straight into cold water with a good squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar, and parboil in the same acidulated water, or the finished dish turns grey-brown.
- Parboiling timeThe book gives none. Sliced coins need 8 to 12 minutes in simmering salted water to be tender enough to breadcrumb and fry; whole roots take 20 to 30. Test with a knife tip — undercooked salsify is unpleasantly fibrous.
- Frying in lardLard is still the best fat for this if you have it; otherwise use a neutral oil or clarified butter at about 350°F. The egg-and-crumb coating needs a hot enough pan to set quickly, since the root inside is already cooked.
- "Five or six good-sized plants"Roughly 1½ to 2 lb of trimmed roots, which serves four as a side or two to three as a soup course. A pint is 2 cups; "rich milk" means whole milk, and whole milk with a splash of cream is closer to the period product.
- Thickening the milkOne tablespoon of flour to a pint of milk gives a very thin sauce. Whisk the flour into a little cold milk first to avoid lumps, and let it boil up as directed — flour-thickened milk tastes raw and pasty if it is only heated through.
- The soup versionThree pints of milk to 1½ lb of root makes a thin, sweet soup. The original says only to serve it with crackers "like oyster soup"; small soup crackers suit it. Any resemblance to oyster stew is in the faint sweetness of the root, not in any real fishiness.
Salsify earned the name "vegetable oyster" or "oyster plant" from a supposed likeness to the bivalve when creamed or stewed in milk, a comparison nineteenth-century American cookbooks repeat often, and the alternate name circulated widely alongside the real one. The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the era when oyster stew was a staple of Northern and Southern tables alike, cheap where oysters were shipped in barrels and expensive where they were not; mock-oyster dishes made from salsify or corn filled the gap inland and out of season. The root itself is Mediterranean in origin, grown in European kitchen gardens well before it reached American ones, and it was a common winter vegetable in the United States partly because it keeps in the ground or in a cellar of damp sand through hard weather. Its near-disappearance from American cooking over the twentieth century is often put down to the labour of scraping it — the same tedium that makes it worth doing once.