Recipes From the Root Cellar_ 270 Fresh Ways to Enjoy Winter Vegetables - Andrea Chesman [22]
A young turnip is different from a fully mature turnip. A freshly harvested turnip, particularly one harvested small, is often milder in flavor than radishes and well suited to enjoying raw. At this point it is interchangeable with a daikon radish and is delicious in Asian-style salads or as an addition to a crudités plate. An older turnip has stronger flavor and is best cooked. At this point it is interchangeable with a rutabaga, though it may not be as sweet and mild.
Availability
Turnips are available from fall to early summer.
Storage
For short-term storage, trim off any green tops and enjoy them cooked separately. Store turnips in perforated plastic bags in the refrigerator for up to 1 week. For long-term storage, store in a root cellar.
How to Buy
The smaller the turnip, the sweeter the flesh and the less likely the texture will be woody. Choose firm, not limp, unblemished roots.
Salad Turnips
In recent years, salad turnips have been showing up at farmers’ markets and in seed catalogs. Grown as a spring or autumn crop, these turnips are small, sweet, and juicy, sometimes even fruity. They are milder in flavor than traditional turnips, even milder than radishes. They are best peeled and eaten raw or very quickly cooked, as in a stir-fry.
Salad turnips are not good keepers for the root cellar, but don’t let that stop you from trying them. They are delicious, and the greens are a tasty bonus.
Preparation
Peel turnips before cooking and trim off the stem and root ends.
Cooking Ideas
Roast ’em, bake ’em, mash ’em, fry ’em. You can employ any cooking method you like with turnips. They marry well with butter, cream, and bacon. If you find that your turnips have become strongly flavored with storage, consider boiling them with a peeled potato. Discard the potato and then mash the turnips with butter and season with salt and pepper and a pinch of nutmeg. The flavor you objected to will be absorbed by the potato. Of course, you could also boil them with potatoes and keep the potatoes for a delicious mash (see pages 20 and 21).
Turnip Math
1 pound turnips = 4 to 8 roots = 3 cups sliced or diced = 4 cups shredded = 2 cups steamed and puréed
Winter Squashes
IMAGINE YOU ARE AN EXPLORER and encounter a vegetable you have never seen before. Would you accept the native name for it? Or would you somehow relate it to the vegetable back home? Such was the quandary of the New World explorers. For the most part, the explorers chose to sow confusion by conflating new vegetables to known ones back home in Europe. Thus, while New World natives had been enjoying squashes and pumpkins for at least seven thousand years, the first European explorers who visited the Americas reported that the natives were cultivating a new type of melon. Nonetheless, squashes were adopted readily by the first European settlers, who couldn’t be too choosy, given their near-starvation circumstances.
Native Americans showed the settlers how to bake whole pumpkins buried in the ashes of a fire, then cut them open and flavor them with animal fat and maple syrup or honey. The Pilgrims modified the recipe, adding milk, sweetener, and spices. A recipe for “Pompkin Pie” appeared in Amelia Simmon’s 1796 cookbook. From then on, pumpkin pie lit up our culinary horizon, and winter squash remained a staple in New England.
Botanists do not distinguish between pumpkins and winter squashes—or between winter and summer squashes, for that matter. There are three basic types of edible squashes. Cucurbita pepo is noted for its pentagonal stems with prickly spines. This group includes pumpkins and acorn squash as well as all the summer squashes, spaghetti squash, and numerous gourds. Butternut squash, which is one of the best replacements for pumpkin in any recipe, is in another grouping entirely (C. moshata, which has pentagonal stems without spines). C. maxima (round stems) includes buttercup, Hubbard, and turban squashes.