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Hashed Turnips
Chop cooked and drained turnips into rather large pieces. Return to the stewpan, and for a pint and a half of turnips, add a teaspoon of salt, 1/4 of a teaspoon of pepper, a tablespoon of butter and 4 tablespoons of water. Cook over a very hot fire until the turnips have absorbed all the seasonings. Serve at once.
A quick finishing method for turnips already boiled and drained, meant to drive off water and concentrate seasoning rather than to stew them further.
- The hingeThe pan must be hot enough that the four tablespoons of water boil away almost immediately, glazing the turnips in salted butter. On a low flame they simply sit and weep, and the dish turns watery.
- Pepper quantityThe pepper measure has lost its fraction in this printing. A quarter teaspoon suits a pint and a half of turnips; season by taste at the end.
- Pint and a halfTurnips here are measured by volume after cooking and chopping, roughly 3 cups, which is about 1 1/4 lb of raw peeled turnip. That yields four modest side servings.
- "Very hot fire"Medium-high to high on a modern burner, in a wide pan rather than a deep stewpan so the moisture has somewhere to go.
- Cooking the turnips firstBoil peeled 1-inch chunks in salted water until a knife enters easily, 12 to 18 minutes depending on age, then drain thoroughly and let the steam escape before chopping.
- Which turnipMost likely the white purple-topped turnip rather than rutabaga, though the recipe does not say. Rutabaga works but is sweeter, denser and needs several minutes longer in the initial boil.
- Timing at the stoveTwo to four minutes is enough once the turnips hit the hot pan. Longer and the pieces break down into a rough mash, which is a different dish.
Turnips were an everyday winter root of the English and American kitchen, cheap enough to feed livestock and reliable enough to store in a cellar until spring. "Hashed" here appears to carry its older sense of simply cut up, not fried into a hash with meat, and returning drained vegetables to a hot pan with butter to finish them is a technique that turns up repeatedly in nineteenth-century cookery. Short entries of this kind assume a cook who already knew how to boil a turnip and needed only to be told what to do with it next.