Turnip Soup
Wash, pare and cut into small pieces half a dozen small white turnips. Boil them in unsalted water until tender, then rub through a fine sieve. Chop fine one small onion, put in a stewpan with one tablespoonful of butter, and cook slowly without browning for five minutes; add one tablespoonful of flour and when blended, add one quart of milk. Stir until boiling hot; add the turnip pulp and season well with salt and pepper. Cook slowly for five minutes; serve at once and pass grated cheese with it.
A straightforward puréed vegetable soup built on a white roux. The only real pitfalls are the turnips themselves and the tendency of milk to catch on the pan.
- Turnip quantity"Half a dozen small white turnips" means young roots roughly golf-ball size or a little larger, perhaps 1 to 1.5 lb trimmed. Large storage turnips or swedes are stronger and more fibrous; if that is all you have, use about 1 lb and expect a more assertive soup.
- Boil in unsalted waterThe recipe specifies unsalted water and leaves the seasoning until the milk is in, so the salt is judged against the finished soup rather than added at two stages.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing through a fine sieve gives a smooth pulp. A blender or food processor does the same in seconds, though a sieve afterwards still catches any stringy fibre from older roots.
- StewpanSimply a saucepan with straight sides. Use a heavy-bottomed one — a quart of milk over direct heat scorches easily in thin pans.
- Cook the onion without colourBrowning the onion or the flour turns the soup grey-beige and gives it a nutty flavour at odds with the mild turnip. Keep the heat low for the full five minutes.
- Adding the milkPour it in gradually and stir constantly until it thickens and comes to the boil, or the flour will lump. Warming the milk first makes this easier.
- The final five minutesThis is only to marry the flavours and cook out any raw flour. Keep it at a bare simmer — a hard boil after the pulp goes in will make the milk separate.
- Yield and the cheeseAbout 1.5 quarts, serving four to six as a first course. The recipe does not say which cheese; a hard grating cheese such as Parmesan or a dry aged cheddar suits it, and a little goes further than you expect against the mild turnip.
Turnips were the workhorse root of the northern European kitchen long before the potato displaced them, and by the time this book appeared they had slipped down the social scale to cattle feed and cottage cooking. In a recipe like this one, the humble root is boiled, sieved, and folded into a milk-and-butter sauce, a technique with many parallels in the repertoire of purée soups, where nearly any vegetable could be given the same treatment. American household books are full of these creamed vegetable soups, a reflection of the practical fact that milk and a spoonful of flour could stretch a few cents' worth of vegetables into a course for six. The grated cheese passed separately is the one flourish, supplying the savoury depth that turnip on its own does not have.