Stuffed Turnip
Prepare the turnips with care; peel them and boil in slightly salted water until half done; take them out, slice off a thin bit from the bottom, to insure their firmly standing, and cut a piece off the top; scoop out the middle of the turnips and fill them with a stuffing of minced veal, onion, parsley and a few truffles or mushrooms; tie on the slices, cut off the tops, place the turnips in a shallow saucepan, pour over them some boiling broth or gravy, add a lump of butter, season with salt and pepper and let them simmer until quite tender. Take them out and arrange them on a dish; thicken the sauce with the yolk of an egg; pour it over the turnips and serve hot.
A hollowed vegetable case braised in stock, the sort of garnish a nineteenth-century kitchen sent up alongside roast game. The two things that decide whether it works are the size of the turnips and the handling of the egg yolk at the end.
- Choose the right turnipsLook for round white turnips about 2½ to 3 inches across, one per person, all of a size so they cook evenly. Large storage turnips or swedes are too coarse and too fibrous to hollow neatly, and their flavour dominates the filling.
- "Half done"Ten to fifteen minutes at a bare boil for a 3-inch turnip, but judge by the skewer rather than the clock: the flesh should give at the outside but still be firm at the centre, or the walls will collapse when you scoop them.
- HollowingLeave a wall about half an inch thick. A melon baller or a small teaspoon works better than a knife. The scooped-out flesh is worth mashing into the stuffing rather than discarding.
- The stuffingThe recipe does not say whether the veal is raw or already cooked; if raw, it needs to reach 160F/71C in the centre, which may mean simmering longer than the turnip alone would suggest. Sweat the onion first; raw onion in the mix will still be sharp when the meat is done. Ground pork or a veal-and-pork mix behaves the same way if veal is hard to find.
- Truffles or mushroomsThe recipe treats truffle as optional, offering mushrooms in its place. Finely chopped brown mushrooms, cooked down until dry, give the savoury weight the recipe is after; a few drops of truffle oil are not a substitute for that step.
- Broth to come halfwayBroth -- The recipe says only to pour boiling broth or gravy over them. Use a shallow pan just wide enough to hold the turnips upright and add enough hot stock to braise rather than drown them; drowned, they turn watery and the sauce never concentrates.
- The egg yolk is the hingeTake the pan off the heat, let the liquid stop bubbling, whisk a ladleful into the beaten yolk, then return it and warm gently while stirring. If the sauce reaches a simmer after the yolk goes in it will scramble and separate.
- YieldFour turnips serve four as a vegetable course or as a garnish for roast game or a joint. About a pound of minced veal fills four medium turnips with a little left over.
Turnips filled with forcemeat belong to the long European tradition of the stuffed vegetable — farci in French practice — where a hollowed root, cabbage leaf or marrow serves as the vessel for a small quantity of expensive meat. Such dishes were often sent to table as a garniture around venison, hare or roast birds, whose strong flavours the sweet, faintly peppery turnip was held to suit. The truffles suggest a debt to professional French cookery, and their casual appearance alongside "or mushrooms" shows that the two were treated as interchangeable. The finish with an egg yolk is an older thickening than the flour-based sauces that came to dominate home cooking — a liaison, standard in the classical repertoire and rich enough to need no roux.