Turnip Soup

Ingredients

• 3 oz butter
• 9 turnips
• 4 onions
• 2 quarts stock
• seasoning

Method

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed pan over moderate heat until foaming subsides — this takes a minute or two. You're looking for the milk solids to turn golden and smell nutty, which means the water's mostly evaporated. If you let it boil hard from the start, the emulsion breaks and you're left with separated fat and water. Once the colour's right, the pan's ready.

Slice your turnips and onions as thin as you can manage — a mandoline does this in seconds, though watch your fingertips. Thickness matters here: thin slices collapse into the butter more evenly, creating the base for proper braising. Add them to the foaming butter along with 250ml of the stock. This first, tight cooking phase is crucial. The vegetables release their sugars and water, which dissolves the browned milk solids stuck to the pan's bottom (the fond). This is where flavour concentrates. Cover the pan and stew gently for 45 minutes to an hour, stirring occasionally. The turnips and onions should break down into a soft mass, almost collapsing. If the pan's hissing or steam's escaping aggressively, your heat's too high — dial it back.

Pour in the remaining stock once the vegetables are completely soft. Simmer, uncovered, for another 30 minutes. This second phase dilutes the concentrate you've built, but the long simmer means the flavours marry properly. The soup will look murky and pale at this point. Pass everything through a fine sieve, pressing the solids through with the back of a spoon to extract all the purée. You'll strain out only tough fibre; everything else goes into the clean pan. If you have a tammy (a drum sieve), it'll give you a finer texture, but an ordinary sieve works fine.

Return the soup to the pan and taste it. Season with salt and white pepper — black specks are visible against the pale colour and look wrong. Heat through gently until steam rises from the surface, but do not let it simmer hard. A rolling boil will break the emulsion and make it grainy. Serve immediately in hot bowls.