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Some Kitchen Kinks: Parsnips
Or the carrots may be cut into dice before cooking and boiled and drained as directed; then put them back in the stewpan, and for every pint add one tablespoonful of butter, one teaspoonful of sugar, half a teaspoonful of salt, and one gill of water or meat stock. Cook over a hot fire until the carrots have absorbed the seasonings and liquid. Parsnips. This vegetable, because of its pronounced taste, is probably not so generally liked as are most of the other roots. It is at its best in the early spring, when it has been in the ground all winter.
The simplest method of cooking the parsnip is to wash it clean, boil it, and then scrape off the skin. Now cut in slices and put in the vegetable dish. Season with salt and butter.
When the parsnips are tender and just out of the ground they will cook in thirty-five minutes; when old it takes from forty to fifty minutes to cook them. The cooked and peeled parsnips may be chopped rather coarse, seasoned with salt, and put into a stewpan with hot milk enough to cover them. Place the stewpan on the range where the heat is moderate.
For a pint and a half of parsnips beat together one tablespoonful of butter and one teaspoonful of flour.
Stir into the parsnips and milk. Simmer for ten minutes. Parsnips are often cut in slices after boiling and fried in butter.
The passage opens mid-sentence in the middle of a carrot recipe, then moves on to parsnips and gives four treatments in quick succession: plain boiled and buttered, creamed in milk, and sliced and fried. All of them assume whole roots cooked in their skins.
- A gillOne gill is half a cup, so the carrot dice are glazed in 1/2 cup of water or stock per pint of vegetable with a tablespoon of butter. Cook uncovered over fairly high heat until the liquid reduces to a glaze.
- Stewpan and rangeA stewpan is simply a saucepan with straight sides. "Where the heat is moderate" means a spot on a wood or coal range away from the firebox; on a modern hob, low to medium-low.
- Boil first, peel afterThis is the hinge of the parsnip method and it is still good practice. Skin left on during boiling keeps the root from waterlogging and slips off easily afterward with a paring knife or the back of a spoon.
- The timingsThirty-five to fifty minutes applies to whole, unpeeled roots. Parsnips cut into 1-inch pieces are tender in 15 to 20 minutes, and overcooked ones collapse into wet fibre, so test with a knife tip rather than trusting the clock.
- Old parsnips have a coreA large late-season root often has a woody, fibrous centre. Cut the boiled root lengthwise and lift the core out before slicing or chopping.
- A pint and a half of parsnipsThis is a volume measure of the chopped cooked vegetable, roughly 3 cups, which is about 1 to 1 1/4 lb of raw parsnips.
- Butter and flour beaten togetherThis is a beurre mani eé in all but name, an uncooked paste stirred into the hot milk to thicken it, though the proportion here is butter-heavy (a tablespoon of butter to a teaspoon of flour) rather than the usual equal parts. Add it in small pieces and keep the pan below a boil, or the flour will taste raw and the milk may catch.
- Frying the slicesBoiled parsnip slices brown well because of their sugar content, but they also scorch quickly. Dry the slices, use butter over medium heat, and turn them once.
The note that parsnips are "at its best in the early spring, when it has been in the ground all winter" is the most practical line in the passage: sustained cold converts stored starch in the root to sugar, which is why overwintered parsnips taste markedly sweeter than autumn-lifted ones. Before the potato became dominant in northern Europe, the parsnip was one of the main starchy winter roots, alongside turnips and others, and its sweetness saw it used in preserves, cakes and country wines when cane sugar was expensive. The writer notes at the outset that the vegetable's pronounced taste makes it "not so generally liked", and the three treatments here reflect that modest position: boiled and buttered, creamed, or fried in slices, all of them plain ways of bringing a root out of the ground and to the table.