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Parsnips Sautéd in Butter
Wash parsnips, cover with boiling water, add salt to season. Cook until tender - thirty-five to fifty minutes. Drain and cover quickly with cold water; rub off skins with the hands. Cut in onefourth inch slices, sprinkle with salt, pepper; dip in flour and sauté a golden brown in hot butter. Brown on one side, then turn and brown on the other.
A straightforward two-stage vegetable dish: boil whole, peel warm, then pan-fry in slices. The only real decision is how big your parsnips are.
- Boil whole, peel afterCooking with the skin on helps keep the parsnips from waterlogging and makes peeling trivial. The cold water in the original cools them enough to handle straight away; the skins rub off under your thumbs.
- Timing depends on sizeThirty-five to fifty minutes suits thick, mature winter roots. Slender supermarket parsnips are usually tender in 15 to 20 minutes; test with a knife tip rather than a clock.
- The woody coreLarge old parsnips develop a fibrous core that stays tough no matter how long you boil. Halve the thick end lengthwise after peeling and cut it out before slicing.
- Dry before flouringThe slices come off the boil wet. Blot them on a towel or the flour turns to paste and will not brown. Season, then flour, then straight into the pan.
- Butter alone will scorchParsnips are sugary and brown fast at the temperature butter starts to burn. Use clarified butter, or add a spoonful of neutral oil to the pan, and work over medium rather than high heat.
- Do not crowdA single uncrowded layer with room between slices is what gives the golden crust; two batches beat one steamed one. Turn only once, as directed.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, about 1 1/2 lb of parsnips will serve four as a side dish.
Parsnips were a winter staple long before the potato displaced them in northern European kitchens, valued because the roots sweeten in cold ground — frost converts starch to sugar, which is why they caramelize so readily in a hot pan. In American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the parsnip is often treated this way: boiled first to tame its density, then floured and fried, a formula also applied to salsify and to eggplant. "Sauté" appearing in the title of a plain family cookbook of this period reflects how far French kitchen vocabulary had spread into ordinary American domestic writing, where it usually meant nothing more elaborate than frying in a shallow pan of butter.