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Baked Parsnips
6 parsnips 4 ozs. (1/2 cup) melted butter Peel and wash the parsnips and cut them in two lengthways. Steam them for one hour. Remove them from the fire, put them into a buttered earthenware dish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, pour the melted butter over them, and set in the oven to bake slowly till perfectly tender and brown. into an earthenware baking dish, pour over the molasses, and bake in a hot oven until the molasses candies over the potatoes.
A plain two-stage method — steam, then bake in butter — that still works, though the timings belong to an era of larger, tougher, later-lifted parsnips. Note also that the text as printed is corrupted: the closing clause about molasses and potatoes has drifted in from a neighbouring sweet potato recipe and has nothing to do with parsnips.
- The stray sentenceIgnore everything from "into an earthenware baking dish, pour over the molasses" onward. It is a printer's intrusion from a neighbouring potato recipe candied with molasses; there is no molasses in baked parsnips.
- Steaming timeAn hour is far too long for modern parsnips, which are lifted younger and smaller. Halved lengthways, they are tender in 12–20 minutes over steam; they should yield to a knife tip but not collapse, since they still have the oven ahead of them.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 300-325F, though period sources vary. At that heat expect 30-40 minutes for the butter to soak in and the edges to colour. If you want browning faster, 375F for 20-25 minutes does the same job.
- The butterFour ounces is half a cup, and it is a great deal for a single dish of vegetables. Two to three tablespoons will coat 1 1/2 lb of parsnips perfectly well.
- Earthenware dishThe instruction is simply for an unlidded earthenware baking dish; any shallow ceramic or metal roasting dish serves, though the parsnips should sit in one layer so they brown rather than steam again.
- Woody coresLarge old parsnips have a fibrous central core that stays stringy however long it cooks. Halved lengthways as directed, the core is easy to cut out with a V-shaped slice before steaming.
- YieldReckon on about 1½ to 2 lb of parsnips, serving four to six as a side dish.
Parsnips were a staple sweetener and bulk starch in British and American kitchens long before the potato displaced them, and they were valued for the fact that frost improves them — cold converts stored starch to sugar, which is why the root was traditionally left in the ground until after the first hard freeze and why old cookbooks treat spring parsnips as the best. That natural sweetness is what makes them take so well to the treatment here: steamed to tenderness, then held in a slow oven until the butter and the sugars on the cut surfaces caramelise.