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Baked Parsnips
Put four thin slices salt pork in a kettle with two quarts cold water, wash and scrape parsnips, and if large halve or quarter, and as soon as water boils place in kettle, boil about half an hour, remove meat, parsnips, and gravy to a dripping-pan, sprinkle with a little white sugar, and bake in oven a quarter of an hour, or until they are a light brown, and the water is all fried out. Add a few potatoes if liked. Those left over, fried in a hot skillet, with butter, ham fat or beef drippings, make a nice breakfast dish. It is better to dip each slice in a beaten egg before frying. Parsnips are good in March or April, and make an excellent seasoning for soups.
A two-stage method: parboil the parsnips with salt pork, then finish them in the pork fat until the water cooks away and the sugars brown. The hinge is the second stage — the parsnips must go into the oven wet and come out dry, or they will steam rather than caramelize.
- QuantityNo weight is given. Two quarts of water and four thin slices of pork would suit something in the region of 2 lb of parsnips, enough for about four as a side dish.
- Salt porkFatty cured pork belly, sold in slabs near the bacon. Unsmoked streaky bacon is the nearest substitute; blanch it briefly if it tastes aggressively salty, since the parsnips will absorb the brine.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to bake a quarter of an hour until light brown and the liquid has cooked away. That implies a hot oven: around 425F will brown the sugar and drive off the liquid in that time, where at 350F the pan will still be wet.
- "Dripping-pan"A shallow roasting pan. Use one wide enough that the parsnips sit in a single layer — crowded, they will not brown.
- Parboiling timeHalf an hour is generous by modern standards. Modern parsnips are bred tender; 12 to 15 minutes, until a knife enters with slight resistance, is enough, and they finish cooking in the oven.
- The coreLarge winter parsnips develop a fibrous, woody core. Halving or quartering, as directed, lets you cut it out — worth doing with anything thicker than about two inches.
- Sugar"A little white sugar" means a light sprinkling, perhaps a teaspoon or two. Parsnips are already sweet; the sugar is there to help the surface brown.
- The leftoversThe egg-dipped fried slices are a real dish in their own right. Slice cold, dip in beaten egg, and fry in butter or drippings over medium-high heat until crusted on both sides.
Parsnips were a staple root in Britain and colonial America long before the potato displaced them, valued because they keep in the ground all winter and improve for it — frost converts some of their starch to sugar, which fits the recipe's own remark that they are "good in March or April" rather than in autumn. Leaving the row unlifted and digging roots as needed through the thaw was a common practice. The pairing with salt pork is a very common nineteenth-century American treatment of vegetables: the pork supplies fat, salt and savour in one cheap slab, and the boiling water it flavours becomes the cooking medium. That the recipe then troubles to brown the roots with a little sugar, and to recommend the leftovers dipped in egg for breakfast, marks it as a dish from a kitchen where a second use was assumed from the start.