Home › Breads, Biscuits, Etc. › Parsnip Pancakes
Parsnip Pancakes
Scrape and boil enough parsnips to measure 3 cupfuls when mashed. Stir into this pulp 1 quart of scalded milk; add 1 tablespoonful of butter and I heaping teaspoonful of salt and let stand until blood warm. Add I yeast cake dissolved in a little warm water and sufficient sifted flour to make a batter. Beat well, cover and set aside in a warm place to rise. When doubled in bulk, add flour to make a soft dough; knead for five minutes and again put aside to lighten.
Roll out in thin, flat cakes; let stand on the board until they begin to swell, then place on a greased pan and fry quickly, or bake on a griddle in the same manner as English muffins.
A yeast-raised griddle bread rather than a batter pancake — closer to an English muffin than to anything you would pour from a jug. The recipe makes a very large batch and leaves the flour quantity to judgment, which is where most of the modern adjustment lies.
- The hinge: this is a dough, not a batterDespite the name, the finished mixture is kneaded and rolled out. Treat it as an enriched bread dough throughout and judge it by feel — soft, slightly tacky, but holding a rolled shape.
- Yeast cakeYeast cakes of the period varied; a compressed cake was commonly in the region of 0.6 oz. Substitute roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast. Active dry can be dissolved in the warm water as directed; instant can go straight into the flour.
- "Blood warm"About 98-100F. The scalded milk and hot parsnip pulp must come down to this before the yeast goes in, or the yeast will be killed. Scalding itself is optional with modern pasteurised milk, but heating the milk speeds the mashing and warms the mixture evenly.
- ParsnipsAbout 2 lb of parsnips gives 3 cups mashed. Large winter roots have a fibrous core; halve them lengthwise and cut it out before boiling, or the pulp will be stringy. Mash smooth and dry — wet pulp will drive the flour figure up sharply.
- Flour, unspecifiedThe original gives no quantity because it depends on how wet the pulp is. Expect a large amount of all-purpose flour for a quart of milk plus 3 cups of pulp — likely 10 cups or more in total: enough at the sponge stage to make a thick batter, then more to bring it to a soft dough.
- Cooking temperature"Fry quickly" means a hot pan, but the sugars in parsnip scorch readily. A griddle at 325-350F is safer, covered for the first half so the centres set.
- The final rise"Let stand on the board until they begin to swell" is a proof of roughly 20-30 minutes in a warm room. Do not let them go to full double or they will collapse when they hit the pan.
- Yield and scalingAs written this produces something like two dozen cakes — a farmhouse quantity. Halving it works cleanly. Cooked cakes freeze well and are best split and toasted, muffin-fashion, rather than reheated whole.
Parsnips were a staple of the northern winter cellar long before the potato displaced them, and they carry their own sugar, which is why they turn up in sweet puddings, wine and breads as often as in soups. Recipes of this kind belong to the economy of the root cellar: by late winter a household had parsnips in quantity — sweeter still after frost, which converts their starch to sugar — and flour that had to be stretched. Working mashed root vegetable into a yeast dough adds bulk, moisture and keeping quality for very little cost, the same logic behind potato rolls and pumpkin bread. The instruction to bake them "in the same manner as English muffins" points to the older griddle tradition of bread-making, which survived in American kitchens well past the arrival of the reliable cookstove oven.