Home › The World's Kitchen › Oyster Plant, Italienne
Oyster Plant, Italienne
Mix in a basin two ounces flour, half gill vinegar and two quarts water. Scrape and remove stalks from a large to two small branches sound oyster plant, then plunge in the prepared water and let stand fifteen minutes, take up and split in halves--the thick part only. Then cut in one-inch long pieces. Plunge in two quarts boiling water, add a sound lemon cut in quarters, and a heavy teaspoon salt; gently boil forty minutes. Drain on a sieve. Reduce in a small saucepan on the fire three-quarters of a pint tomato sauce to half the quantity, place the oyster plant in a black frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter. Season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper and fry for ten minutes, or until a nice brown, then add to the tomato sauce with two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese; mix well. Place in a hot vegetable dish and serve.
Oyster plant is salsify, a long tan root that oxidises the moment it is peeled, which is why the recipe opens with a flour-and-vinegar bath rather than with cooking. The method is sound; the boiling time is the one number worth ignoring.
- The hinge: the acidulated blancThe flour, vinegar and water make what French kitchens call a blanc. Peeled salsify turns grey-brown within minutes and the flour suspension plus acid keeps it pale. Drop each piece in as you scrape it rather than after, and note the sticky white latex the cut root exudes stains hands and boards.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of vinegar is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making three saltspoons 3/4 teaspoon pepper. Three-quarters of a pint of tomato sauce is 12 fl oz, reduced to about 6.
- Boil forty minutes: too longBoil forty minutes: probably too long -- forty minutes is longer than most cooks would give it today. One-inch lengths of salsify are usually tender in roughly 20 to 30 minutes depending on thickness, so start testing early with the point of a knife. They still have to spend ten minutes in the frying pan.
- "A large to two small branches"Filippini appears to mean whole roots, not bunches: one large root or two small ones. Only the thick upper part is split lengthwise; the tapering tail is left whole.
- The black frying panA blacked wrought-iron or cast-iron pan, called for because it holds heat and browns well. Any heavy skillet works, but the drained roots must be genuinely dry and the butter hot or they steam instead of colouring.
- Tomato sauceNot ketchup and not a jarred pasta sauce. A plain cooked tomato sauce, thinned with stock in the period style, is what reduces cleanly by half. If you use a thick modern passata-based sauce, reduce it less or it will turn to paste.
- Yield and servingThe recipe finishes in a hot vegetable dish, i.e. a vegetable course alongside a roast. The quantities point to a modest side dish rather than a fixed number of servings. Stir the Parmesan through at the end.
Salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius) earned the English name oyster plant from a flavour generally said to resemble oysters, though the resemblance is more often asserted than tasted; the black-skinned scorzonera was often sold and cooked as the same thing. It was common in American kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century, valued because it stored in the ground over winter, and it later fell out of general use. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, published The International Cook Book in 1906, and "Italienne" here is menu French of the Escoffier generation rather than a claim of Italian origin: it signals tomato and Parmesan.