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Parsnip Fritters
4 good-sized parsnips, 1 tablespoonful of flour, 1 egg.
Boil the parsnips until tender, when done, drain and mash through a colander. Add the flour and well-beaten egg, a half teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper. Mix well and form into small, round cakes. Put two tablespoonfuls of drippings into a frying pan, when hot put in the cakes. Brown on one side, then turn and brown on the other. Drain on brown paper and serve with roasted or spiced beef.
A simple binding-and-frying job that depends almost entirely on getting the mashed parsnip dry enough to hold together.
- The hinge: dry the puréeBoiled parsnip carries a great deal of water, and one tablespoon of flour and one egg is a very light bind. After draining and passing the parsnips through the colander, return the purée to the dry pan over low heat for a minute or two to steam off moisture, or the cakes will slump in the fat.
- Quantity and yieldFour good-sized parsnips is perhaps 1½ to 2 lb untrimmed, which should give something like 3 cups of purée and eight to ten small cakes — enough for about four as a side dish.
- Core the older rootsLarge parsnips have a woody central core that will not mash smooth. Quarter them lengthwise and cut the core out before boiling; the recipe says nothing about it.
- DrippingsBeef or bacon dripping, saved from roasting. Any neutral oil or clarified butter works; whole butter will brown too fast at the heat needed. Two tablespoons is a shallow fry, so cook in batches rather than crowding.
- Heat and timingMedium-high, about three minutes a side, until the crust is set and deep gold. Moving the cakes too early is the usual cause of failure — leave them alone until they release from the pan.
- Brown paperThe period drainer. Paper towel or a wire rack over a tray does the same job; a rack keeps the underside crisp if you are holding them for the table.
- ServingPaired here with roast or spiced beef because parsnip's sweetness sits well against salt and pepper-cured meat. They are equally good with pork or a strong cheese.
Parsnips were a staple sweetener and starch in northern European kitchens long before the potato displaced them, and they held on longest in exactly this role — a sweet, floury vegetable fried in meat fat and served alongside the roast. Frost is generally said to improve them, since cold weather converts stored starch to sugar, which is why parsnips were traditionally left in the ground into winter and appear so often in cold-season cookery. The fritter format — boil, mash, bind with egg, fry in dripping — was applied widely across the nineteenth-century vegetable repertoire, to corn, salsify, hominy and squash alike, and it offers a way of making a plain boiled root worth putting on the table twice.