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Fried Parsnips
Boil as directed in preceding recipe; when done, drain, season with salt and pepper, dip first in melted butter, then in flour and dust with sugar. Put two tablespoonfuls of drippings or lard into a frying-pan, when hot, put in enough parsnips to cover the bottom of the pan. Fry brown on one side, then turn and brown on the other. Serve with roasted pork.
A straightforward two-stage vegetable dish: parboil, then pan-fry. The only real difficulty is that the preceding recipe it depends on is missing here.
- The missing first stepThe preceding recipe is not reproduced here, but it would almost certainly have been plain boiling: scrub and peel the parsnips, boil in salted water until tender (roughly 15-20 minutes for halved roots), then drain well. With large parsnips it is worth cutting them lengthwise into quarters and cutting out the woody core, which stays fibrous however long it cooks.
- Dry them before dredgingBoiled parsnips hold surface water, and wet parsnips will not take a flour coat or brown. Drain and let them steam dry in the colander for a few minutes before the butter and flour.
- DrippingsPork or bacon drippings, or lard. Any neutral oil works, though the dish is built to sit beside roast pork and the pork fat is part of the point. Two tablespoons in a wide skillet is about right.
- The sugarParsnips are already high in sugar, more so after a frost, and the dust of sugar here probably does as much to help them brown as to sweeten them. Use a light hand and keep the pan at moderate heat: sugared flour scorches fast and turns bitter.
- Don't crowd the pan"Enough parsnips to cover the bottom" means a single layer with gaps. Piled up, they steam and the crust never sets. Fry in batches if you must.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 to 2 lb of parsnips serves four as a side dish.
Parsnips were a staple sweetener and winter starch in northern Europe long before the potato displaced them, and they kept a fixed place at the pork table well into the nineteenth century: the roots were left in the ground through the frost, which converts stored starch to sugar and makes them noticeably sweeter after a hard freeze. Books of this kind, aimed at the ordinary American kitchen, treat parsnips as an everyday root rather than a curiosity. The parboil-then-fry method is the standard period treatment for a dense root vegetable: boiling makes it tender, frying gives it the browned exterior that boiling alone cannot, and the flour dredge is simply the cheapest way to get a crust.