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Oyster Plant Salad
Scrape and cut the stalks from a large bunch of fresh, tender oyster plants, cut them in one-inch-long pieces, split each thick piece in half, plunge them in a quart of cold water with two tablespoons of vinegar, and thoroughly wash them, drain and place them in a saucepan with a sound lemon cut in pieces, a teaspoon salt, boil them for forty minutes, drain on a sieve, place them in a vessel and let stand in a cool place until cold. Then place them in a salad bowl, season with two tablespoons dressing, mix well, and at the last moment add three tablespoons mayonnaise dressing, neatly mix, wipe bowl all around and serve.
Oyster plant is salsify, and the whole success of the dish rests on keeping it pale and not cooking it to mush. Two of the original's numbers need adjusting for roots as they come today.
- Oyster plant = salsifyTragopogon porrifolius, a long tapering ivory root sold in bunches with the tops attached, sometimes labelled salsify or vegetable oyster. Black salsify (scorzonera) behaves much the same but bleeds more and needs peeling rather than scraping.
- Work fast, keep it acidulatedCut surfaces brown within a minute or two, so scrape and cut straight into the quart of cold water with the two tablespoons of vinegar rather than letting the pieces sit on the board. The sap is sticky and latex-like; it comes off hands more easily with oil than with water.
- Forty minutes is too longRoots of the size now sold are tender in 15 to 25 minutes for one-inch pieces, and beyond that they collapse into fibre and thread. Start testing at 15 minutes with a knife tip; they should give with slight resistance, since they will soften a little more as they cool.
- The lemon and salt in the waterA whole lemon cut in pieces and a teaspoon of salt to the pan is a blanc in miniature, the acid keeping the roots white. Some old kitchens added a spoon of flour to the water for the same reason; the lemon alone is enough.
- "Two tablespoons dressing"Filippini almost certainly means a plain French dressing, that is a vinaigrette of oil and vinegar with salt and pepper; the exact proportions are not given here. It goes on while the salsify is cold but before the mayonnaise, so the root absorbs the acid rather than being sealed by the emulsion.
- Mayonnaise at the last momentAdded early it thins as the salsify weeps and the salad turns milky. Fold it in just before it goes to the table. If you make mayonnaise from scratch, note that the eggs are not cooked at any point in this dish.
- "Wipe bowl all around"A service instruction, not a cooking one: clean the smears from the inside rim of the bowl with a cloth before it leaves the kitchen.
- YieldA large bunch of salsify is about 1 to 1.5 lb trimmed, which gives four small side salads.
Salsify was widely known as oyster plant because of a faint marine sweetness cooks claimed to taste in the boiled root, though this is traditional attribution rather than documented fact, and it was a familiar American kitchen-garden vegetable, listed in seed catalogues alongside parsnip and turnip. Its uses ran to mock oyster fritters, cream soups and salads like this one, all of which lean on the resemblance rather than pretending to it. The recipe's cadence, the plain French dressing followed by mayonnaise at the last moment and the closing order to wipe the bowl, is characteristic of the professional continental service that Alessandro Filippini learned during his years at Delmonico's in New York and carried into his cookbooks. Salsify became scarce in American markets over the twentieth century and now turns up mainly in European greengrocers and at farmers' markets in late autumn and winter.