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Parsnip Fricassee
This is savory and good. Cut 1/2 pound of fat pickled pork in narrow fingers, brown slightly, cover with boiling water and simmer one hour.
Add 8 parsnips pared and quartered and more water to cover; when boiling add 1 quart of quartered potatoes and simmer until the vegetables are tender. Drain off the water and replace with milk, season highly and simmer ten minutes after thickening slightly. Stir in 1 egg mixed with milk and turn into a hot dish.
A one-pot dish of salt pork and root vegetables finished with an egg-and-milk liaison. The only delicate step is the last one.
- The egg is the hingeStir the beaten egg and milk in off the heat, or with the pan barely steaming, and do not let it return to a simmer. Above roughly 180F the egg sets in threads and the sauce goes grainy instead of glossy.
- Fat pickled porkThis is salt pork, cured in brine rather than smoked. Supermarket salt pork or a thick slab of unsmoked streaky bacon works; if only smoked bacon is available the dish will taste of smoke, which it should not. "Narrow fingers" gives no measurement; read it as short batons, roughly finger-thick.
- Salt"Season highly" was written for pork far saltier than most modern cures, and for cooks who drained the vegetable water away. Taste before adding any salt at all — pepper and a good grating of nutmeg do more here.
- A quart of potatoesPotatoes are measured by volume, cut and then measured: a quart of quarters is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb. Waxy varieties hold their shape; floury ones will start to dissolve and thicken the milk on their own.
- Eight parsnipsAim for about 2 lb, quartered lengthwise, with any woody core cut out of large roots.
- Thickening slightlyThe original assumes you know the method: a tablespoon of flour worked into a little cold milk and stirred in, or a small flour-and-butter paste. Give it two or three minutes of gentle simmering before the egg goes in so the flour loses its raw taste.
- TimingThe hour on the pork is for tenderness, not safety, and can be shortened to 40 minutes with modern bacon. Parsnips need 15-20 minutes, potatoes 12-15 — add them so they finish together rather than following the clock blindly.
- YieldServes four generously as a main dish, six alongside something else. It thickens as it cools and does not reheat well once the egg is in.
Parsnips were a staple sweetener and winter starch in northern Europe and colonial America long before the potato displaced them, and they keep in the ground through frost, and they were cheap in late winter when little else was. The name fricassee normally signals meat cut up and cooked in a white sauce, and its use here for a vegetable dish is telling — the half pound of salt pork is flavouring and fat rather than the substance of the meal, and the egg-thickened milk stands in for the cream-and-yolk liaison of a proper French fricassee de poulet. It is a trick often associated with frugal cookery: a small quantity of cured pork, a bulk of roots, and a rich-tasting finish built from milk and one egg.