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Stewed Parsnips
Wash, scrape, and slice about half an inch thick; have a skillet prepared with a half pint hot water and a table-spoon butter, add the parsnips, season with salt and pepper, cover closely, and stew until the water is cooked away, stirring occasionally to prevent burning. When done, the parsnips will be of a creamy, light brown color.-Mrs. D. B.
A straightforward braise-then-glaze: the parsnips cook in the water, and once it evaporates they finish frying in the butter left behind. The color change at the end is the whole point of the dish.
- The hinge: stay at the pan for the last five minutesOnce the water has gone, the butter and the parsnips' own sugars brown fast. That is where the "creamy, light brown color" comes from, and also where they scorch if you walk away.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup. In a 10-inch skillet with a lid, that will cook off in roughly 15-20 minutes for half-inch slices; adjust rather than watching the clock.
- "Skillet" here means a lidded frying panEarlier American skillets were sometimes legged cast-iron pans for hearth cooking, but by this period a flat-bottomed stove pan is the likelier reading; any wide heavy pan with a tight cover works. Width matters more than depth: a single crowded layer steams rather than browns.
- QuantityThe recipe gives none. About 1 1/2 to 2 lb of parsnips suits a cup of water and serves four; more than that and you will need to cook in two batches or the slices will not brown evenly.
- Core the old onesLarge winter parsnips develop a woody central core that tends to stay stringy however long it stews. Quarter thick roots lengthwise and cut it out before slicing.
- Cut for even cookingParsnips taper hard, so half-inch rounds from the tip cook long before the shoulder does. Cut the thick end into halves or quarters lengthwise so all the pieces are about the same thickness.
- ButterA tablespoon is modest for two pounds of vegetable. It is enough to glaze, but if you want real browning add a second tablespoon once the water is nearly gone.
Parsnips were a staple of the American kitchen garden well into the nineteenth century, valued because they keep in the ground through winter and grow sweeter for having been frozen -- cold converts some of their starch to sugar, which is why they brown so readily in a pan. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping grew out of a collection first published in Ohio in 1876 as The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book; it was assembled from contributions by local housewives, which is why this one is credited to "Mrs. D. B." rather than to an author's byline. The method is essentially a braise-glaze, the same principle French cooking treats as glacer, arrived at here by the practical route of cooking a root in a little water with butter until the water is gone. Parsnips lost ground in American cooking through the twentieth century as the potato and the sweeter varieties of carrot took over the same place on the plate.