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Oyster Plants with Tomato Sauce
Mix in a basin two tablespoons flour with two quarts water and three tablespoons vinegar. Remove the stems and scrape a large bunch fresh oyster plants, then plunge in the prepared water and thoroughly wash; drain and replunge in two quarts boiling water, with a teaspoon salt and half a lemon, and boil forty-five minutes. Lift up with a skimmer, then cut into one-inch pieces and place in a small saucepan with one and a half gills tomato sauce and half an ounce good butter. Season with two saltspoons salt and a saltspoon pepper, mix well, cover pan, and set in oven twenty minutes, remove, pour into a vegetable dish and serve.
Oyster plant is salsify, a long tan root that browns the moment it is peeled, which explains the odd flour-and-vinegar bath at the head of the recipe. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: the acidulated waterThe flour-and-vinegar mixture is a blanc, a French device for keeping pale vegetables pale. Scraped salsify oxidises to grey-brown within a minute or two, so have the basin ready before you touch the roots, and drop each piece in as you finish it.
- What oyster plant isSalsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), said to be named for a faint shellfish flavour, sold in bunches with the tops on. Black salsify or scorzonera can stand in. Look for firm roots; limp ones tend to be woody at the core.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of tomato sauce is about three-quarters of a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: half a teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of pepper here. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Boiling timeForty-five minutes suits thick winter roots left whole. Modern bunches are often slender, and pieces can collapse in half that time. Start testing at 20 minutes and pull them while a knife tip still meets slight resistance, since they get another 20 minutes in the oven.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven-heat term at all. A moderate modern oven, around 350F, will serve for the covered finish, which is really about marrying the sauce to the root rather than further cooking.
- The tomato sauceIn a book of this period this means a cooked, seasoned sauce of the tomato-and-roux family, not ketchup and not raw passata. A plain marinara or a reduced tinned-tomato sauce works; keep it loose, as it will tighten under the lid.
- Handling the rootsSalsify exudes a sticky white latex when cut. Scrape rather than peel deeply, and rinse your knife and hands as you go or everything gums up.
- YieldA large bunch varies; perhaps a pound to a pound and a half once trimmed, which should serve about four as a side dish.
Salsify was a standard kitchen-garden root across Europe and in American gardens through the nineteenth century, valued because it kept in the ground over winter and could be lifted as needed. The name "oyster plant" is an English and American nickname for its supposed resemblance to oysters when cooked, a comparison usually made more enthusiastically in seed catalogues than at the table. The treatment here is thoroughly French in method, from the vinegar-and-flour blanc to the half lemon in the cooking water, which suits The International Cook Book's habit of putting classical technique behind homely American vegetable names. Salsify fell out of general use in the twentieth century, a decline that coincided with the rise of canned and frozen vegetables on the winter table, and it now turns up mainly at farmers' markets and in restaurants reviving older produce.