Restaurant meals have always been celebratory meals for me, but a celebration doesn’t have to mean a birthday. When I was a grad student, before the big exam days, I’d hide out in my apartment subsisting on Frosted Flakes and Cheez-Its, then emerge from the shadows to indulge in what I called Brain Dinner at my local oven pizzeria. of bricks. Buca, which has since closed. But I wouldn’t go for a pepperoni pie or even a Hawaiian. My order would be a salmon dish: a center cut fillet gently salted, grilled until crisp around the edges but pink and tender on the inside. It came with a relish of red onion, olives and capers and a trio of summer vegetables: eggplant, zucchini and squash. It turned out that the scorching heat of a brick oven meant great pizza, but even better salmon and vegetables. You can’t really recreate that kind of flavor at home, what Koreans would call bulma, or taste of fire.
If there was ever a recipe for making turnips sexy, it would be this citrus-lacquered version.
Sometimes the rarity on a menu can be the chef’s passion project reason enough to order it. Newcomers to New Orleans’ favorite Pêche Seafood Grill may not know that the restaurant consumes a lot of vegetables, but you need to know to order them. When I visited town for a friend’s wedding in January, my eyes fell on citrus-glazed turnips. They seemed so modest, perhaps even out of place, on the flashy menu of raw staples like oysters that vary in volume and brine; a nutty, almost creamy flavored Gulf royal red prawn dish that smears your fingers with a crab-roe sauce; and the beloved steak tartare with smoked oyster aioli on toast, which landed on nearly every dining room table. Who knew that the star of my seafood lunch would be a side of turnips?
Nicole Cabrera Mills, chef de cuisine at Pêche and creator of the dish, told me that she had been trying to make turnips happen for a while: turnip puree, turnip cakes, turnip gratin. All delicious, but people still turned away from them. The “humble turnip” isn’t anyone’s favorite vegetable, she says. “You’re not talking about mushrooms.” But if ever there was a recipe for making turnips sexy, it would be this citrus-lacquered version, which surprised even Mills and became a sleeper hit for the restaurant.
By cooking seasonally and using local ingredients, Mills was doing what he always does: buying the crop from his favorite turnip farmer, Timmy Perilloux, who lives and farms in Montz, Louisiana. Because space in his kitchen was limited, he had to process the turnips quickly. He also helped turnip season coincide with citrus season, when satsumas were plentiful in New Orleans. Together, they were the perfect combination of sweet and sour. A simple reduction of satsuma juice, gochugaru, and butter, this glaze tempers roasted turnips quickly, giving them a beautiful pearlescent sheen, almost an iridescence.
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