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Oyster Plant in Cream
Place in a basin two ounces flour, two quarts water and half gill vinegar; mix well. Scrape a large bunch sound, fresh oyster plants, cut off stems and immediately plunge in the prepared water and thoroughly wash, drain and plunge in three quarts boiling water with a tablespoon salt, adding a sound lemon cut in pieces, and boil forty minutes or until soft. Drain on a sieve, then cut in half-inch pieces. Prepare a cream sauce. Drop the oyster plant in the sauce, squeeze in juice of quarter of a sound lemon, lightly mix, boil five minutes. Pour into a vegetable dish, sprinkle a little parsley over and serve.
Oyster plant is salsify, a long tapering root that oxidises to grey-brown the moment it is cut. The flour-and-vinegar bath at the head of the recipe is the whole reason the finished dish looks white, and it should not be skipped.
- What oyster plant isSalsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), sold in winter at farmers' markets and some greengrocers, and named for a faint shellfish flavour in the cooked root. Black salsify, or scorzonera, behaves the same way in the pot and can be substituted directly.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup of vinegar. Two ounces of flour is a scant half cup, whisked into the water to make what French kitchens call a blanc: the flour clouds the water and keeps air off the cut surfaces.
- Work fast and wear glovesSalsify exudes a sticky white latex when scraped and browns within a minute in air. Peel one root at a time and drop it straight into the acidulated water; the sap is easier to wash off gloves than off fingers.
- Forty minutes is too longThat timing suits thick, mature field roots. Whole modern salsify of thumb thickness is tender in 20 to 30 minutes, and pieces cut before boiling in 15. Test with a knife tip and pull it while it still holds its shape, since it collapses to fibres if overcooked.
- The cream sauceA plain béchamel of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and about 1 1/2 cups milk, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg, will serve. Make it slack rather than thick, because it will tighten during the five minutes the salsify spends in it.
- Lemon at the endThe second squeeze of lemon goes into a hot dairy sauce, so add it off the heat or stir it in briskly at the very end. A large amount of acid dropped into simmering cream sauce will curdle it.
- YieldA large bunch is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of roots, which trims down to serve four as a side dish.
Salsify was a standard winter root in nineteenth-century American and European kitchens, valued for keeping in a cellar through the cold months and for the mild, faintly oyster-like taste that gave it its common name — the same association behind mock oyster soup and salsify fritters, which appear all through household cookery of the period. Its decline in the twentieth century had less to do with flavour than with labour: the roots are thin, irregular, and must be scraped rather than peeled, and the sap stains everything. Books like this one treat that work as unremarkable. The blanc technique here — flour and acid in the soaking water — is a professional habit borrowed from French practice, used equally on cardoons, artichoke bottoms and celeriac for exactly the same reason.