To Cook Turnips
To boil turnips, wash and pare the turnips; boil in water with one tablespoonful of sugar until tender, drain, press out the water, mash fine and season with butter, salt and pepper and one tablespoonful of cream and serve.
Another way to use the boiled turnips is after they are drained, cut in thin slices with cream or drawn butter. And another is, after they are mashed fine and seasoned, add a little cream and melted butter; beat up fine and light. Have a well buttered baking dish, put the light turnips in and brown lightly in a quick oven.
Three treatments of the same pot of boiled turnips: mashed, sliced in cream, or baked into a light puree. The sequence is worth reading as one recipe with two variations rather than three separate dishes.
- The hinge: get the water outTurnips hold far more water than potatoes, and a mash that has not been drained and pressed will be soupy and dull. After draining, return them to the dry pan over low heat for a minute or two and press firmly with a masher or the back of a spoon, pouring off what comes out.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-425F. The baked version is only browning an already-cooked puree, so it wants brisk heat and a short stay -- 15 to 20 minutes or so, until the top is patched with color.
- Drawn butterNot simply melted butter. In books of this period it is a thin butter sauce: butter melted, a little flour stirred in, thinned with water or the vegetable cooking liquid and whisked smooth. Melted butter alone will pool rather than coat the slices.
- The tablespoon of sugarIt goes in the cooking water, not the mash. It reads less like sweetening than like an attempt to take the edge off the mustardy bite of the root, though the recipe does not say so. Worth keeping with older or larger turnips; young spring turnips do not need it.
- Which turnipThe recipe suits both white turnips and swedes (yellow turnip or rutabaga in American usage), but they cook differently. White turnips are tender in 15 to 20 minutes cut in chunks; swedes want 25 to 35 and mash a deeper gold.
- Cut before boilingThe recipe says only to pare and boil, without saying whether whole or cut. Quartering or cubing after paring will cook faster and more evenly, and lets more water drain away afterward.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of trimmed turnip serves four as a side dish. The single tablespoon of cream is modest for that quantity -- add it by the spoonful until the mash loosens without slumping.
Turnips were the workhorse root of the northern kitchen long before the potato displaced them, cheap enough to feed livestock and keepable in a clamp or cellar right through winter. That very abundance gave them a reputation as coarse fare, which may explain the effort in this recipe: sugar in the water, cream and butter in the mash, and a final browning in the oven, all aimed at making a common root fit for a company table. The baked version is essentially the same logic applied to potatoes in a duchesse.