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Parsnips, Stewed
Boil two moderate-sized parsnips until tender then drain, and cut them into slices about half an inch thick and three inches long. Make a little good white sauce with two ounces of butter, a table-spoonful of flour, a table-spoonful of stock, the third part of a pint of new milk (or cream, if obtainable), and a little salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg. Stir this sauce over the fire until it is smooth and thick, put in the sliced parsnips, simmer for a few minutes, and serve. Time, five or six minutes to simmer the parsnips in the sauce. Probable cost, 8d., if the sauce be made with milk. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain white-sauce vegetable dish that hangs entirely on how far you take the parsnips in the first boiling. Aim for just-tender, since they get five or six minutes more in the sauce.
- The hinge: don't overboilParsnips go from tender to mush quickly, and the second simmer in the sauce finishes them. Note that the recipe boils the roots whole and slices them afterwards, so allow rather longer than you would for cut pieces: boil until a knife meets slight resistance, then drain well so the sauce is not watered down.
- Quantities"Two moderate-sized parsnips" is about 1 lb / 450 g trimmed. A third of a pint is a scant 7 fl oz, near enough to 3/4 cup plus a spoonful; a tablespoon of Victorian measure is close enough to a modern one here.
- Butter to flourTwo ounces of butter to one tablespoon of flour is very rich, and far more fat than that much flour can comfortably carry; the sauce may well look greasy or break. Cutting the butter back sharply, or increasing the flour well beyond a single spoonful, will give something that holds together more reliably.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured. Whole milk is the equivalent; the cream option gives the sauce the body the butter-heavy roux otherwise lacks.
- The tablespoon of stockA period habit of lifting a milk sauce with a little meat broth. It contributes savour rather than liquid; any light chicken or vegetable stock works, or leave it out and salt a little more firmly.
- Woody coresLarge winter parsnips often have a fibrous core that stays tough long after the rest is done. The recipe calls for moderate-sized roots boiled whole, but if yours are big, quartering them lengthwise and cutting the core away first is worth doing.
- YieldFour to five as a side dish, as stated — modest portions by current standards. Season the sauce at the end, after the parsnips have released some of their sweetness into it.
Parsnips carried much of the sweet-starchy load in British cooking before the potato displaced them, and they were still standard winter fare when Cassell's dictionary was assembled in the later nineteenth century. This entry is typical of the book's method: a boiled vegetable is redeemed by being finished in one of the handful of sauces a Victorian kitchen kept in constant rotation — here a plain b nutmeg and all, the nutmeg being what one would often expect as the seasoning for anything milk-based in this period. The costing in pence, given as a single figure qualified by whether the sauce be made with milk, points to the book's readership of households where cream was an occasional luxury rather than a shelf staple, and where a side dish that fed five for eightpence was worth writing down.