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Oyster Plants Saute Au Beurre
Neatly scrape and trim well a large bunch fresh, sound oyster plants. Plunge them in cold water with two tablespoons vinegar for give minutes. Remove, drain and cut into one-inch-long pieces. Drop them in a saucepan with one tablespoon vinegar, one tablespoon flour, one tablespoon salt and three pints cold water. Cover the pan and slowly boil for forty minutes. Drain well. Heat in a frying pan one and a half tablespoons melted butter, place the oyster plants in the pan; season with two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon white pepper, then frequently toss them while cooking for five minutes. Squeeze in the juice of half a sound lemon, adding a teaspoon finely chopped parsley. Gently toss again for one minute and serve.
"Oyster plant" is salsify, a long tapering root sold as salsify or scorzonera (the black-skinned kind). The recipe is two operations: a blanching bath that keeps the peeled root from browning, then a quick toss in butter.
- The hinge: the acidulated waterPeeled salsify oxidizes to grey-brown within minutes. The vinegar soak and the flour-and-vinegar cooking liquid (a French blanc) exist purely to keep it pale, and skipping either gives a drab dish. Whisk the flour into a little cold water before adding it to the pan so it does not lump.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the sauté is seasoned with about 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon white pepper.
- The tablespoon of saltThat goes into three pints of cooking water, not onto the vegetable, and most of it is drained away. Treat it as ordinary well-salted blanching water.
- Forty minutes is too longForty minutes is long -- Salsify cut into one-inch pieces is usually tender in 15 to 25 minutes at a bare simmer, and longer boiling can leave it too soft to hold together in the frying pan. Test with a knife tip at 15 minutes.
- "Slowly boil"A gentle simmer with the lid on. A rolling boil breaks the pieces up, and hard prolonged boiling will drive off some of the vinegar, though the flour is doing most of the work of keeping the root pale.
- Butter quantityOne and a half tablespoons is thin for a large bunch of root; two to three tablespoons in a wide pan gives enough fat to brown the pieces rather than steam them. Let them sit undisturbed for a minute before the first toss to get some colour.
- YieldA large bunch is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb of trimmed root, serving four as a side dish.
Salsify earned the name "oyster plant" from a supposed resemblance in flavour between the cooked root and oysters — a comparison usually traced to English and American kitchen gardeners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and one many modern eaters find hard to detect. It was a standard winter vegetable in American gardens through the nineteenth century, valued because the roots keep in the ground or in sand through cold weather, and it appears often in household cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s in soups, fritters and mock oyster patties. Its near-disappearance from markets says less about the vegetable than about the labour it demands: the roots are skinny, forked, and leak a sticky white latex when peeled. The treatment here — a blanc to hold the colour, then butter, lemon and parsley, described as sauté au beurre — is standard French vegetable practice.