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Parsnips (Wash and scrape the parsnips)
Wash and scrape the parsnips; cut in slices about one fourth of an inch thick; cover with boiling salted water and allow to boil for five minutes. Place in cooker for three hours. Drain and brown in frying pan or season with salt, pepper and butter.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe: the parsnips are brought to a boil on the stove, then transferred to an insulated box that holds the heat while they finish. The method translates directly to a slow cooker or a heavy covered pot in a low oven.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest, sometimes with soapstone or iron discs heated on the range, in which a hot pot finished cooking on stored heat alone. Nothing is added during the three hours; the whole point is that the fire is out.
- Modern equivalentUse a slow cooker on low, or set the covered pot in a low oven. Parsnips cut a quarter inch thick will likely be tender well before three hours by either route; the long period in the original reflects a vessel losing heat rather than the vegetable needing that long.
- The five-minute boil is the hingeThat initial boil is what loads the pot with heat to carry it through. Cover the slices generously with water that is already at a rolling boil, get it back to the boil, then move it from the heat, sealed and undisturbed.
- Choosing parsnipsLook for roots no thicker than about two inches at the crown; older, fatter ones have a woody core that stays fibrous however long it cooks. Cut that core out if it is visible as a paler ring.
- Salting the waterAbout a teaspoon of salt per quart is enough. Parsnips are already sweet, and the salted water seasons them from the inside in a way that salting at the end does not.
- Browning at the endDrain thoroughly and pat dry, or the slices will steam rather than colour. Butter in a hot pan for two or three minutes a side caramelises their sugars and is the better of the two finishes offered.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities; as a modern guide, about a pound and a half of parsnips will serve four as a side dish.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American kitchens between roughly 1900 and the 1920s, promoted in pamphlets and cookbooks as a way to save fuel and to keep a coal range from heating the house all afternoon; commercial cookers were sold alongside homemade versions insulated with hay, newspaper or excelsior. Parsnips suited the method well, being dense, forgiving and cheap. They were a common root through the nineteenth century, valued because they sweeten in the ground over winter, some of their starch converting to sugar after frost, and were often left in the ground and lifted as needed rather than stored. Their retreat to the margins of the American vegetable counter came later.