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Parsnips (Wash the parsnips clean boil)
Wash the parsnips clean; boil them until tender; scrape off the skin and slice them into a vegetable dish, seasoning with salt, pepper and butter or pouring drawn butter over them. If preferred, the cooked parsnips may be chopped rather coarse, seasoned and returned to the fire with milk sufficient to cover them. Thicken with a teaspoon of flour rubbed in a tablespoon of butter; simmer for ten minutes and serve.
Still another method of serving the parsnips is to fry the slices in butter after they have been boiled.
A straightforward three-way treatment of boiled parsnips: buttered, creamed, or pan-fried. The only real technique here is boiling them whole and unpeeled, which is worth keeping.
- Boil first, peel afterScraping the skin from a hot boiled parsnip is quicker than peeling a raw one. The recipe does not say to cut them up before boiling, so whole roots are implied; reckon 20 to 30 minutes for medium roots, longer for anything thick as a wrist.
- The woody coreOlder, larger parsnips carry a fibrous core that stays stringy no matter how long it cooks. Once boiled and skinned, split them lengthwise and lift the core out with a knife tip before slicing.
- Drawn butterIn American books of this period drawn butter is not clarified butter but a simple sauce: butter melted, thickened with a little flour, and let down with hot water until pourable. About 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon flour and a cup of water makes enough for a dish of parsnips.
- The creamed versionThe thickening is a beurre manié ubbed into the butter rather than cooked as a roux, so give it the full ten minutes of simmering or the sauce will taste of raw flour.
- Frying the slicesCut boiled parsnips into planks about half an inch thick, dry them on a towel, and fry in butter over medium-high heat until the sugars caramelize on both sides. Wet slices will steam instead of browning.
- SeasoningParsnips are sweet, so they carry salt and black pepper well; season to taste. A grating of nutmeg is a reasonable addition to the creamed version, though the recipe does not call for it.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon about 1 1/2 lb of parsnips for four as a side dish.
Parsnips were a far more important vegetable in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than they are now, valued because they keep in the ground through winter and because frost converts some of their starch to sugar, which is why they were traditionally left in the earth until after a hard freeze and lifted through the cold months. In American cookery they were a standard late-winter and early-spring vegetable, often served alongside salt fish or boiled pork, and their sweetness was put to use in country wines. The three treatments given here bo, boiled and buttered, creamed, and fried are the sort of handling any boiled root tended to receive in this period. Their decline in the American kitchen is often attributed to the arrival of cheap year-round produce, which removed the need for a vegetable that could be stored in a field.