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Parsnip Fritters
Boil four good-sized parsnips in salted water until quite tender. Drain them, beat them to a pulp, from which squeeze as much of the water as possible. Bind the parsnip-mash together by mixing smoothly with it an egg and a dessert-spoonful of flour. Make it into oval cakes with a spoon, and fry in hot dripping until they are lightly browned on both sides. Drain them on an inverted sieve, and serve neatly piled on a hot napkin. Time to boil the parsnips, an hour or more; to fry them, a few minutes. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A simple vegetable fritter that hinges on one thing: getting the water out of the parsnip. Everything else is forgiving.
- Dry the pulp properlyWet mash will not hold an oval shape and will spit in the fat. After draining, press the pulp in a clean towel or work it through a ricer and let it steam dry in the pan for a minute before adding egg and flour.
- An hour is far too longAn hour is long by modern standards -- cut parsnips are usually tender in 15 to 20 minutes, whole ones in 25 to 30. The longer time may reflect larger, coarser roots than are commonly sold now; boiled that long they lose colour and flavour.
- Woody coresLarge parsnips develop a fibrous core that will not mash. Halve them lengthwise and cut it out before boiling.
- Dessert-spoonfulRoughly two teaspoons. If the mash is still slack, add flour a teaspoon at a time rather than measuring precisely; the moisture of the parsnip decides the amount.
- DrippingUsually beef dripping, one of the common frying fats of a Victorian kitchen. Any neutral oil, clarified butter or bacon fat works; a shallow layer at about 350F, deep enough to come halfway up the cakes.
- Four good-sized parsnipsAbout 1.5 lb trimmed, which is right for the stated five or six servings as a side dish. Expect eight to twelve cakes.
- Draining and the hot napkinAn inverted sieve is a Victorian draining rack; a wire cooling rack over a tray does the same job and keeps the undersides crisp. The napkin is a folded linen cloth on the serving dish to absorb any remaining fat, and can be skipped.
The book places this among the plain vegetable cookery of a Victorian household, where parsnips were cheap winter roots eaten far more often than they are now. The probable cost of sixpence for a dish serving five or six marks it as thoroughly economical fare. Parsnips are often said to have carried some of the sweetening work in northern European kitchens before cane sugar became cheap, and they were used in wines and sweet puddings as well as plain boiled; the fritter here is one of many ways of turning a mealy root into something that would take a place on a table beside a joint.