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Turnips Glazed, Spanish Style
Peel six white, medium turnips and cut in quarters, place in a saucepan with an ounce butter, half a teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon sugar, three saltspoons white pepper, half a saltspoon Spanish saffron and two gills white broth; mix a little, cover pan and set in oven one hour, being careful to baste them with their own liquor once in a while, pour into a vegetable dish and serve.
A braise disguised as a roast: the turnips cook covered in a small amount of buttery, saffron-tinted stock until the liquid reduces to a glaze. The original gives no oven temperature and assumes you know what a saltspoon holds.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of white pepper is three-quarters of a teaspoon and half a saltspoon of saffron is about an eighth of a teaspoon — a generous pinch of threads. A gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of broth.
- The butterAn ounce of butter is two tablespoons. It is doing the glazing work along with the sugar, so do not cut it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a sensible modern choice for a covered braise of this kind, but the book specifies nothing. Much higher and the cup of broth will boil away before the turnips soften.
- White brothA light unbrowned stock — veal, chicken or plain vegetable. Colour matters here because the saffron is meant to carry the dish; a dark beef stock will muddy it.
- Bloom the saffronCrumble the threads into a few tablespoons of the warm broth for ten minutes before adding, rather than dropping them in dry. Saffron in whole threads sitting in butter gives you yellow streaks instead of an even colour.
- White pepperThree-quarters of a teaspoon in a dish of six turnips is assertive by modern taste. Start with half and adjust at the table if you prefer.
- TimingAn hour suits large, dense winter turnips in quarters. Small spring turnips or young swedes will be tender in 35 to 45 minutes — check with a knife tip and uncover for the last ten minutes if liquid remains, so it reduces to a syrup rather than a soup.
- BastingThe instruction is not decorative. The turnips sit above the liquid line, and spooning the pan juices over them two or three times is what builds the glaze and the colour.
- YieldSix medium turnips serve four to six as a side dish.
Saffron is the whole argument for the "Spanish style" label: by the early twentieth century saffron cultivation in La Mancha had given Spain a reputation as a leading source, and in Anglo-American cookbooks of the period "Spanish saffron" functioned as both a grade and a geographic claim, distinguishing the real stigmas from the safflower and turmeric sold as substitutes. The technique itself is standard French — glazed root vegetables cooked in butter, sugar and a little stock, basted until the liquid reduces to a coating — and the national tag comes from a single spice rather than from any Spanish dish in particular. That is how The International Cook Book generally works: a professional kitchen vocabulary applied across a set of national labels, with one signature ingredient doing the identifying.