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Fricassee of Parsnips
Scrape the parsnips and boil them in milk until tender. Take out and cut them in four pieces if they are large; add a piece of butter the size of a walnut, also salt and pepper to the milk they were boiled in, thicken with a very little cornstarch or flour; put the parsnips back in the dressing and let them simmer about forty minutes. - Mrs Sada Ballard.
A plain nineteenth-century milk-braise that produces its own sauce. The only real trap is the closing time: the parsnips are already cooked before the sauce is made.
- Ignore the forty minutesThe parsnips have already been boiled tender, and another forty minutes in the sauce will reduce them to mush. Five to ten minutes at a bare simmer is enough to warm them through and let the thickening set.
- Milk scorchesUse a heavy-bottomed saucepan and keep the milk at a lazy simmer, never a rolling boil. A thin pan over high heat will catch on the base and give the whole dish a burnt taste that no amount of butter covers.
- How much milkThe original gives none. Enough to just cover the parsnips is the intent; for 1 1/2 to 2 lb of roots that may be anywhere from 2 to 4 cups depending on the width of the pan. Whole milk is generally less prone to breaking than skim.
- A piece of butter the size of a walnutUsually reckoned at 1 to 2 tablespoons. Butter of the period ranged from unsalted to heavily salted depending on the dairy, so taste before adding the salt.
- "A very little cornstarch"Figure 1 to 2 teaspoons of cornstarch, or double that of flour, slurried in cold milk or water before it goes in. Add it off the boil, then bring back to a simmer briefly to lose the raw starch taste.
- Prep the roots properlyScrape or peel thinly, and if the parsnips are thick and old, quarter them lengthwise and cut out the fibrous core. Modern supermarket parsnips are frequently large and woody at the center.
- YieldServes four as a side dish. It is rich and quite sweet, and sits well beside roast pork, ham or a strong-flavored fish.
Parsnips were a staple winter root in Britain and North America long before the potato displaced them, valued because a hard frost converts their starch to sugar and makes them sweeter after being left in the ground. "Fricassee" here is used loosely: in French cookery it generally means meat cooked gently in a white sauce made from its own cooking liquid, and that is broadly the method here — the milk becomes the dressing — though no meat is involved. The signed attribution to Mrs Sada Ballard suggests the sort of collection that gathered household economies from readers, and a dish that thickens its own cooking liquid wastes nothing.