Home › A Calendar of Dinners › March 27
March 27
Menu: Grape Fruit Cocktail; Roast Duck, Currant Jelly; Creamed Turnips; Sweet Potato Croquettes; Apple Salad; Cheese Straws; Marmalade Ice Cream; Coffee Creamed Turnips-Wash turnips, and cut in 1/2 inch cubes. Cook 3 cups in boiling salted water 20 minutes, or until soft. Drain, and serve with the following sauce: 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and pepper to taste. Put Crisco in saucepan, stir until melted and bubbling; add flour mixed with seasonings, and stir until thoroughly blended. Pour on gradually the milk, adding about 1/3 at a time, stirring until well mixed, then beating until smooth and glossy.
A plain white sauce over boiled turnips, printed as part of a day's menu rather than as a standalone recipe. Two things decide whether it is good: how long the turnips boil and how long the roux cooks.
- Crisco and substitutesCrisco here is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, the product the book exists to sell. Butter makes a better-tasting sauce at the same measure; any neutral solid fat or oil works if you want the flavour to stay in the background.
- Cut the boiling timeTwenty minutes can leave half-inch turnip cubes very soft; the recipe's own 'or until soft' allows less. Start testing at 8 minutes and drain as soon as a knife goes in with slight resistance, often 10-14 minutes depending on the age of the root.
- Peel deeply"Wash turnips" says nothing about peeling. Storage turnips can have a tough, bitter outer layer under the skin; take it off with a knife rather than a peeler, cutting about an eighth of an inch in.
- Cook the flour"Stir until thoroughly blended" means a minute or two of actual cooking over moderate heat. Add the milk while the roux is still hot and the flour raw-tasting and the sauce will taste of paste no matter how smooth it looks.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons each of fat and flour to a cup of milk is a medium white sauce, thick enough to coat. It will tighten as it stands; loosen with a splash of milk before serving.
- Drain hardTurnips hold a great deal of water. Let them steam dry in the colander for a minute, or the sauce will thin out on the plate.
- SeasoningThe quarter teaspoon of salt is for the sauce; the turnips take theirs from the salted boiling water. A grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of the turnip cooking water sharpens an otherwise very mild dish.
- YieldThree cups of raw cubes with one cup of sauce serves four as a side.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed oil shortening, two years earlier. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a menu for every day of the year, each one quietly built around the new fat, and this creamed turnip dish belongs to March 28, when root vegetables from winter storage were still what a household actually had. The white sauce itself is pure cooking-school orthodoxy of the period: equal parts fat and flour to a cup of milk, taught in the same proportions by Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries and used as the base for creamed everything, from onions to chipped beef. Substituting shortening for the butter such sauces normally called for was exactly the argument the book was making, that Crisco could stand in anywhere butter or lard had been used, at lower cost.