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To Stew Parsnips
Peel and slice parsnips. Boil them in a covered vessel with slices of nice pork, until done, adding salt and pepper to taste.--Mrs. G. B.
A one-line nineteenth-century vegetable dish that depends entirely on the pork for its character. A few notes on quantities and on the parsnips themselves.
- The pork is the seasoning"Nice pork" here most likely means salt pork or fat side meat, sliced thin, rather than fresh chops, though the recipe does not specify. It supplies fat and salt to a root that has neither. Blanch very salty pork briefly if you want control over the final seasoning, and taste before adding salt.
- Core the old onesLarge late-winter parsnips develop a woody, fibrous core that will not soften no matter how long it boils. Quarter them lengthwise and cut it out; small young roots can be sliced whole.
- Water levelThe recipe does not say how much water to use; a covered vessel suggests keeping the parsnips barely covered, so the liquid reduces to a scant sauce rather than washing away the sweetness. Roughly half a cup of water to a pound of parsnips works, topped up only if the pan threatens to go dry.
- TimingSliced parsnips are tender in 15 to 20 minutes; the pork wants longer. Start the pork with the water, give it 20 minutes or so, then add the parsnips.
- DiscolorationCut parsnips brown quickly. Hold them in cold water until the pan is ready if you are prepping ahead.
- YieldA pound and a half of parsnips with three or four ounces of pork serves four as a side dish.
Parsnips were a staple winter root in Virginia kitchens, valued because they keep in the ground through frost and in fact sweeten with it, as cold converts their starch to sugar. Cooking them with a few slices of salt pork was a common Southern treatment for vegetables of the period, from beans to cabbage to greens: cured pork was often on hand in a household that killed a hog each winter, and it made otherwise plain roots and leaves into something worth eating. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathers hundreds of such contributions from named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, and the brevity of this one is typical of the book: it assumes a cook who already knows what a covered vessel and a slice of pork will do together.