No. 718

Puree of Kohl-Rabis

Puree de Choux-Raves

Cut these vegetables in four, peel and blanch them for ten minutes, and finish cooking them in one quart of broth (No. 189); season with salt, and when the moistening is reduced, pound the kohl-rabis, adding to the pulp two pints of reduced veloute (No. 415), and two gills of cream; press well through a tammy (No. 170), and just when serving stir in two ounces of fresh butter.

← No. 717 Puree of Garlic Garnishings No. 719 Puree of Lentils with Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stocks and mother sauces already on hand; the method is sound but the proportions are built for a hotel service. Read it as a ratio rather than a shopping list.

Quantity of kohl-rabi is not givenThe original names no weight, only the liquids. Working back from one quart of broth and the finished volume, something on the order of 3 to 4 lb of trimmed bulbs is implied, but this is an inference, not a figure from the text.
Two gills of creamA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup. Two pints of veloute is four cups, which is a great deal of sauce against the vegetable; for a puree served as a garnish rather than a sauce, the sauce can be cut back considerably and adjusted to taste.
Velouté No. 415, reducedA white stock sauce thickened with blond roux and cooked down until it coats. Reduced means simmered and skimmed until noticeably thick before it goes into the purée, otherwise the finished dish is soup.
Peel deeplyKohl-rabi carries a fibrous layer well under the visible skin, and older or larger bulbs are woody at the core. Cut in quarters as directed, then pare past the fibre; anything that resists the knife will resist the tammy too.
"When the moistening is reduced"Cook the blanched quarters in the broth uncovered until almost all the liquid has gone and the vegetable is glazed and quite soft. That reduction is where the flavour comes from, so do not drain it off partway.
A tammyA tammy cloth is a fine woollen or linen sieve through which the purée was forced with a wooden pestle. A food mill followed by a pass through a fine chinois or drum sieve gives the same texture; a blender alone will be smooth but not free of fibre.
The butter at the endTwo ounces of fresh butter, as the recipe specifies, stirred in off the heat at the moment of service. Once the butter is in, the puree must not boil or it will break and turn oily.
Seasoning and yieldSalt is the only seasoning named; the broth and veloute are expected to carry the rest. As written this makes a large quantity, well beyond a domestic batch.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its "Garnishings" chapter is essentially a catalogue of vegetable purees built to the same template: blanch, braise in stock, pound, bind with a mother sauce, finish with cream and butter. Kohl-rabi, the swollen-stemmed brassica whose German name combines Kohl (cabbage) and Rabi (turnip), was available in nineteenth-century America. Turning it into a smooth puree bound with veloute is a characteristically French solution to a vegetable regarded as rustic: the pounding and tammying erase its coarseness entirely. The cross-references scattered through the text -- broth No. 189, veloute No. 415, the tammy No. 170 -- show how the book was meant to be used, as a numbered system for a professional kitchen rather than a set of standalone recipes.