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Baked Parsnips
6 good-sized parsnips, 1 tablespoonful of flour, 1 tablespoonful of butter, ½ teaspoonful of salt, Dash of pepper. > Wash and scrape the parsnips, cut them in halves; put them into a saucepan, cover with boiling water and boil one hour. Drain, and put them on a hot dish. Put the butter in a frying-pan, add to it the flour, mix until smooth without browning. Add a half pint of the water in which the parsnips were boiled, stir and boil five minutes. Add the salt and pepper, pour over the parsnips, dust with crumbs, and if liked, a little cheese. Bake in a quick oven fifteen minutes.
A simple flour-and-butter sauce over boiled parsnips, finished under browning heat. The one thing to change is the boiling time.
- An hour is far too longHalved parsnips are tender in 12 to 18 minutes in boiling salted water, depending on thickness; a skewer should meet no resistance at the core. An hour reduces them to sweet mush that collapses when the sauce goes on. Older, woodier field parsnips took longer, but nothing sold today needs it.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is enough to set the sauce and colour the crumbs. A broiler for three or four minutes does much the same job if the parsnips are still hot.
- Half a pint of cooking waterOne cup. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour that gives a thin, pourable sauce, which is what is intended here - it is meant to soak into the crumbs, not to cling. For a thicker coating use two tablespoons of each.
- Mix until smooth without browningCook the butter and flour together over moderate heat for a minute or two so the raw flour taste goes, but stop before it takes colour. Add the parsnip water off the heat or in a slow stream while whisking, then bring it up and boil the full five minutes.
- Crumbs and cheese, unmeasuredAbout a half cup of dry breadcrumbs and a quarter cup of grated hard cheese covers six parsnips. Tossing the crumbs with a little melted butter first gives more even browning than dusting them on dry.
- Woody coresLarge parsnips often have a fibrous core. If you halve them lengthwise, cut the core out with the tip of a knife where it looks pale and tough - it will not soften with the rest.
- YieldSix parsnips serves four to six as a side dish.
Parsnips were an important winter root in Britain and North America, valued for their sweetness before cheap sugar and displaced as an everyday staple by the potato, and cookbooks of this period still treat them as an ordinary vegetable rather than a curiosity. The treatment here - boil, sauce, crumb, brown - is a common late-Victorian formula applied to vegetables that would hold their shape, much like scalloped tomatoes, creamed onions and cauliflower au gratin; the crumb-and-cheese top belongs to the same family as the French gratin. Parsnips are frost-sweetened, their starch converting to sugar in cold ground, which is why they were traditionally dug through the winter and were reckoned best after a hard freeze.