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Parsnip Fritters (Mrs E)
-Mrs. E. Α. Β.
Boil tender; mash smooth and fine, picking out the woody bits. For three large parsnips allow two eggs, one cup rich milk, one tablespoonful butter, one teaspoonful salt, three tablespoonfuls of flour. Beat the eggs light; stir in the mashed parsnips, beating hard; then the butter and salt; next the milk. Fry as fritters.
A plain nineteenth-century vegetable fritter, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew what a fritter batter should look like. The gaps are mostly about consistency and frying medium.
- Batter consistency is the hingeThree large parsnips mashed with two eggs, a cup of milk and only three tablespoons of flour gives a very loose batter that will spread and fall apart in the pan. Add flour by the spoonful until it drops thickly from a spoon and holds its shape for a second on the surface of the fat.
- "Fry as fritters" means shallow fat"Fry as fritters" — the recipe gives no fat depth or temperature. A batter this soft is easiest handled dropped by spoonfuls into shallow hot butter or lard in a heavy skillet and turned once, though fritters of this period were also often cooked in deeper fat.
- Pick out the woody coreThe instruction to remove the woody bits is not optional. Large parsnips develop a fibrous, sometimes bitter core that never softens; halve them lengthwise and cut it out before or after boiling.
- "Rich milk"Whole milk, or whole milk with a spoonful of cream. Skim milk will thin the batter further and give a paler fritter.
- Beat the eggs lightThis means beaten until pale and frothy, which is the only leavening in the recipe. There is no baking powder here, so the lift comes entirely from the air in the eggs and the steam in the pan.
- Yield and servingThree large parsnips make roughly a dozen fritters, enough for four as a side dish. They were served hot alongside roast or boiled meat; a little pepper and a squeeze of lemon suits modern palates.
- Boiling timeThe original says only "boil tender." Peeled and cut into chunks, parsnips take about 15-20 minutes. Drain them well and let the steam dry off before mashing, or the batter will be wetter still.
Parsnips were a staple winter root long before the potato displaced them in Britain and North America, valued because frost converts their starch to sugar and they keep in the ground through the cold months. That natural sweetness is why they turn up so often in nineteenth-century cookery both as a savoury vegetable and, in older receipts, in sweet puddings and even as a base for country wine. Fritters were a standard way to make a plain boiled root worth eating a second time, and community cookbooks of the period are full of them, compiled as such books were from the household books of local women.