Home › Vegetables › Salsify or Vegetable Oysters (Wash thoroughly scrape off)
Salsify or Vegetable Oysters (Wash thoroughly scrape off)
Wash thoroughly, scrape off skin with a knife, cut across in rather thin slices, stew until tender in water enough to cover them, with a piece of salt codfish for seasoning. Before sending to table, remove codfish, thicken with flour and butter rubbed together, toast slices of bread, put in dish, and then add the vegetable oyster. This method gives the flavor of oysters to the vegetable, and adds much to its delicacy. Or, after stewing until tender in clear water, mash, season with pepper and salt, and serve. - Mrs. Gov. J. J. Bagley, Michigan.
A plain stew of salsify given an oyster flavor by cooking it with salt cod. Two things determine whether it works: keeping the peeled root from browning, and desalting the codfish first.
- Salsify browns instantlyScraped and sliced salsify oxidizes to a dull grey-brown within a minute. Drop the slices into cold water with a splash of vinegar or lemon juice as you work, and cook them in fresh water.
- Soak the salt codfishNineteenth-century salt cod was hard, dry and heavily salted. The recipe gives no size and no soaking instruction; since the cod is here only 'for seasoning' and is lifted out before serving, how far to desalt is a judgment call. If the piece is large or very hard, several hours in cold water, changed two or three times, will keep the dish from turning too salty. Modern lightly salted or fresh cod will give less of the intended effect and needs no soaking.
- Cooking timeThin slices in barely enough water to cover will be tender in 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the age of the root. Older, woodier salsify takes longer and never fully softens at the core.
- Flour and butter rubbed togetherThis is beurre manié — equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, then whisked into the simmering liquid in small pieces. About 1 tablespoon of each will lightly thicken roughly 2 cups of broth; use more for a heavier sauce. Let it simmer a minute or two to lose the raw flour taste.
- The toastThe bread is there to soak up the sauce, in the manner of an oyster stew served over toast. Cut it thick and toast it dry and hard, or it collapses before it reaches the table.
- SeasoningSalt only at the end, and only after tasting — the codfish has already seasoned the liquid. Pepper is worth adding generously; salsify is mild to the point of blandness.
- YieldA pound of salsify, trimmed, serves three or four as a side dish. Buy more than seems necessary; the roots lose a good deal to scraping and to trimming off the thin, forked ends.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) earned the name "vegetable oyster" or "oyster plant" from a faint resemblance in flavor — a resemblance often said to be easier to notice once one has been told about it, which may be why this recipe reaches for a piece of salt cod to help the illusion along. It was a common kitchen-garden root in nineteenth-century America, valued because it kept in the ground or in sand through winter and gave a soft, mild dish at a season when little else was available fresh. The attribution is to Frances Newberry Bagley, wife of John Judson Bagley, governor of Michigan in the 1870s; The Dixie Cook-Book, like many subscription cookbooks of the 1880s, carried contributed recipes from governors' wives and other prominent households well outside the South. Salsify fell out of American cooking in the twentieth century as year-round vegetables became ordinary, and now turns up mostly at farmers' markets alongside its black-skinned relative, scorzonera.