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Parsnip Cake
Boil two or three parsnips until they are tender enough to mash, then press them through a colander with the back of a wooden spoon, and carefully remove any fibrous stringy pieces there may be. Mix a tea-cupful of the mashed parsnip with a quart of hot milk, add a tea-spoonful of salt four ounces of fresh butter, half a pint of yeast, and enough flour to make a stiff batter. Put the bowl which contains the mixture in a warm place, cover it with a cloth, and leave it to rise. When it has risen to twice its original size, knead some more flour into it, and let it rise again; make it into small round cakes a quarter of an inch thick, and place these on buttered tins. Let them stand before the fire a few minutes, and bake them in a hot oven. These cakes should be eaten hot. They do not taste of the parsnips. Time, some hours to rise; about twenty minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1s, for this quantity. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A yeast-raised griddle-style bread cake in which cooked parsnip acts as a moistening starch rather than a flavour. Most of what needs translating here is the leavening and the temperature of the milk.
- Cool the milk firstThis is the hinge. A quart of milk poured hot onto yeast will kill it outright; mix the parsnip and butter into the hot milk, then let the whole thing come down to about 100F before the yeast goes in.
- Half a pint of yeastThat is liquid barm or brewer's yeast, much weaker than modern dried yeast and carrying a good deal of liquid with it. About two teaspoons of instant dried yeast will leaven this quantity; dropping the barm also drops half a pint of liquid, so allow for that when judging the flour.
- A tea-cupfulA teacupful is usually reckoned at about 5 to 6 fl oz, so somewhere around three-quarters of a modern cup of mashed parsnip. Two or three parsnips will give you rather more than that; the surplus is not wasted on soup.
- Enough flour for a stiff batterUnspecified, as usual, and it varies with how wet the parsnip is. Expect somewhere near 2 lb of plain flour in the first mixing and more worked in at the second, until the dough is soft but no longer sticks to the hand.
- A hot oven425-450F. At a quarter of an inch thick the cakes will colour fast, so start checking at ten to twelve minutes rather than waiting out the stated twenty.
- Standing before the fireThis is the final proof, done in the radiant heat of the fire. The recipe allows only a few minutes; a warm spot in the kitchen for ten minutes or so does the same work.
- Stringy coresOlder, larger parsnips have a woody central core that will not mash. The instruction to pick out fibrous pieces after sieving is worth following literally, or cut the core out before boiling.
- YieldSix to eight people, as stated, which might come to a couple of dozen small cakes. They stale quickly and are genuinely best eaten hot, as the original insists.
The parsnip was the English kitchen's chief sweet root before the potato displaced it and cheap cane sugar made its sweetness unremarkable. Boiled and sieved, it does much the same job as mashed potato in a dough: it holds water, softens the crumb and keeps the cake from drying out overnight. The flat assurance that they do not taste of the parsnips is suggestive of how the ingredient was regarded by the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century, though the writer's motive can only be guessed at; parsnips were by then also grown as stock feed. The half-pint of yeast is the other period marker: this is a household still buying wet barm by volume from a brewer or baker, an arrangement that compressed and then dried yeast steadily replaced.