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Parsnip Pudding
Wash, scrape, and boil four or five large parsnips, mash them, and press them through a colander. Stir in with them a little grated nutmeg, or any other flavouring, one ounce of fresh butter, and four well-beaten eggs, together with two table-spoonfuls of brandy, if approved. Butter a pie-dish, pour in the mixture, and strew finely-grated bread-crumbs thickly over; divide one ounce of butter into small pieces, and place these here and there upon the pudding. Bake in a moderate oven, and serve with sweet sauce. This pudding may be boiled instead of baked. When this is done, the mould into which the mixture is put should be thickly lined with finely-grated bread-crumbs before the pudding is turned in. Time, about an hour and a half to bake; an hour and a quarter to boil. Probable cost, 1s., exclusive of the brandy. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian vegetable pudding that behaves like a savoury-sweet custard: parsnip purée bound with egg and baked under a buttered crumb crust. A few of the original's silences need filling.
- How many parsnips"Four or five large" is imprecise; a total of somewhere around 2 lb untrimmed is a reasonable working figure. Modern parsnips are often woody at the core; if the centre is fibrous, cut it out before mashing.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). At that heat the egg sets gently and the crumb topping colours without burning.
- Drain the purée hardThis is the hinge. Boiled parsnip holds a great deal of water, and a wet mash will weep and refuse to set around four eggs. Drain, return to the dry pan over low heat for a minute or two to steam off, then mash and pass through the colander.
- No sugar in the mixtureThe recipe adds none; the sweetness is meant to arrive with the "sweet sauce" served alongside, which would generally have been a custard or sweetened white sauce, sometimes with brandy. Taste the purée before deciding whether to sweeten at all.
- TimingAn hour and a half at 350F is generous for an egg-set pudding in a pie-dish. Start checking at 50-60 minutes: it is done when the centre is just firm to a light press and a knife comes out clean. Longer than that and the eggs curdle and the texture turns grainy.
- The boiled versionThis means a buttered and crumbed pudding basin, covered with pleated greaseproof and foil or a floured cloth, standing in a pan of simmering water reaching two-thirds up the sides. Keep the water at a bare simmer and top it up; a hard boil will make the custard bubble and separate.
- Butter and brandyThe recipe uses two ounces of butter in all: one ounce (about 2 tablespoons) beaten into the mixture and a second ounce dotted over the crumbed top. The two tablespoons of brandy are optional and mostly aromatic; nutmeg alone, or nutmeg with lemon zest, does the job.
- Cost and yield"Probable cost, 1s." is the original shilling estimate and has no modern equivalent worth quoting. Five or six servings is about right as a pudding course.
Sweet puddings built on root vegetables were long-standing English economy: carrot puddings appear in printed cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and parsnip was pressed into the same service because it is sugary, starchy and cheap, storing well in a clamp through the winter. Parsnips were also used domestically for a country wine, and the root is often said to have been a Lenten and fast-day food in Britain and northern Europe, though the claim is traditional rather than documented, as is the notion that parsnips served as a sweetener before cane sugar became inexpensive in the nineteenth century. Cassell's, an encyclopaedic household work aimed at a middle-class kitchen that still counted pennies, prints the dish with its cost attached and the brandy marked as optional — a fair picture of how such a pudding was placed: respectable, filling, and adjustable to what the household could afford. By the twentieth century the potato and imported fruit had displaced it, and parsnip returned to the plate as a vegetable rather than a dessert.