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Oyster Plant, Poulette
Neatly scrape, remove the stalks and trim well a bunch of fresh oyster plants; immerse in cold water with two tablespoons vinegar for five minutes. Remove, drain, and cut into one-inch-long pieces. Place in saucepan with a tablespoon vinegar, a tablespoon flour, a tablespoon salt and three pints of cold water. Cover the pan and slowly boil for forty minutes; drain on a sieve. Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in a saucepan, add four finely chopped shallots and lightly brown for five minutes, then mix in two tablespoons flour; moisten with one and a half pints of broth and half a gill of milk. Season with two saltspoons salt, a saltspoon cayenne and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well until it comes to a boil. Add the oyster plants and half a teaspoon chopped chives. Mix well and let cook for ten minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Dilute an egg yolk with a tablespoon cream and add to the oyster plant, lightly mix and serve in a deep vegetable dish.
Oyster plant is salsify, and poulette is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Two things decide whether this works: keeping the roots from browning while you prepare them, and not letting the finished sauce boil after the yolk goes in.
- The liaisonOnce the yolk-and-cream mixture is stirred in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle into scrambled threads. Pull the pan off the heat, stir the yolk in, and serve at once.
- Oyster plantThis is salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius). Black salsify, or scorzonera (Scorzonera hispanica), is a different root that is generally used in the same way. The name is usually said to come from a faint shellfish flavour in the cooked root; there is no oyster in the dish.
- Why the vinegar and flourPeeled salsify oxidises to a dull grey within minutes. The acidulated soak and the flour-and-vinegar cooking liquid make what French kitchens call a blanc, which keeps the pieces pale. Both steps are worth keeping.
- Cooking timeForty minutes at a slow boil may reduce young salsify to mush. Start testing at 15 minutes; the pieces should yield to a knife tip but hold their shape, since they get another ten minutes in the sauce.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning is half a teaspoon salt, a quarter teaspoon cayenne and a quarter teaspoon nutmeg. A gill is half a cup, making half a gill a quarter cup of milk.
- The tablespoon of saltThat much salt is for the blanching water only, not the sauce. Three pints of water with a tablespoon of salt is roughly correct seasoning for a vegetable boil.
- BrothA pint and a half of stock against two tablespoons of flour gives a thin sauce by design. Use a light chicken or veal stock; a heavily reduced modern stock will overpower the root.
- YieldA bunch of salsify is roughly a pound, less once trimmed. Expect four to six servings as a side dish.
Salsify was a standard winter root in American and European kitchens through the nineteenth century, valued because it stored well in sand through the cold months and because its mild, faintly briny flavour let cooks turn it into mock-oyster dishes on the strength of the resemblance. Poulette is one of the classic derivative sauces of the French repertoire, a velouté sharpened with lemon or vinegar and bound at the last moment with egg yolk and cream; it was applied to sweetbreads, mussels, tripe and, as here, to vegetables. The pairing of a humble root with a fully worked French sauce is characteristic of the grand-hotel cooking of the period. Salsify has largely dropped out of English-speaking markets since the mid-twentieth century, though it remains common in France and Belgium and turns up at farmers' markets in late autumn.