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Creamed Parsnips
1 pint chopped parsnips 2 tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter Clean, and scrape the parsnips, and split lengthwise twice; then cut into one-inch pieces. Boil in salted water--one-half teaspoon to the pint--until tender, which will require one to two hours if old or forty-five minutes if young. Make a white sauce of the remaining ingredients. Mix the white sauce with the cooked parsnips, from which the liquid has been drained, reheat, and serve.
A plain white-sauce vegetable dish whose only real problem is the boiling time, which belongs to a different era of parsnip.
- The boiling timeOne to two hours will reduce modern parsnips to sweet mush. Cut into one-inch pieces, they are tender in 12 to 20 minutes in salted water; test with a knife tip from about 10 minutes.
- A pint of chopped parsnipsThis is a volume measure, not a weight: about two cups of cut-up root, or roughly half to three-quarters of a pound trimmed, two medium parsnips. It yields about two cups cooked.
- Old versus young rootsThe recipe's long timing points to old storage roots rather than young ones. If a root is thick at the crown, the split-lengthwise-twice instruction lets you cut out the fibrous core, which can stay tough however long it boils.
- The white sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup of milk is a medium sauce, thick enough to coat. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding the milk so it does not taste of raw flour, and add the milk gradually off the heat to keep it smooth.
- Salting the waterHalf a teaspoon per pint of water is about right and still worth doing; parsnips take up salt as they cook and are flat without it.
- Draining mattersDrain the parsnips well and let them steam dry for a minute before combining. Cooking water clinging to the pieces will thin the sauce and dull it.
- SeasoningThe original stops at salt. Black pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are conventional with a milk sauce, and a little lemon juice cuts the parsnips' sweetness.
- YieldServes three to four as a side, or two if it is standing in as the main dish.
Parsnips were the northern European starch of choice long before the potato displaced them, valued because the roots sweeten in the ground after frost as stored starch converts to sugar. That sweetness and their dense, filling texture are why they turn up in dishes with enough body to anchor a dinner. A bland root bound in a buttery milk sauce was the standard formula for making a vegetable behave like a main course.