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Parsnips with Drawn Butter Sauce
Wash and scrape parsnips, and cut in pieces two inches long and one-half inch wide and thick. Cook five minutes in boiling salted water, or until soft. Drain, and to two cups add one cup Drawn Butter Sauce.
A plain nineteenth-century vegetable dish that depends entirely on two things the text takes for granted: that you know what drawn butter sauce is, and that you will ignore the stated cooking time.
- The five minutes is wrongBatons of parsnip that thick need 8 to 15 minutes in boiling water, depending on the age of the root. The phrase "or until soft" is the instruction that matters; treat the number as a printer's optimism and test with a knife tip.
- Drawn butter sauceNot clarified butter. In this period it is a white sauce made with water rather than milk: roughly 1/3 cup butter to about 1/4 cup flour and 1 1/2 cups hot water, seasoned with salt and pepper, with part of the butter stirred in at the end. One cup is what this recipe calls for.
- Woody coresLarge winter parsnips develop a fibrous core that stays stringy however long you boil it. Split the thick end lengthwise and cut it out before making the batons.
- ScrapingFashionable then, unnecessary now. A vegetable peeler is faster and wastes less, and the flavour is not in the skin.
- Salted waterSalt the water properly, about a teaspoon per quart. Parsnips are high in sugar and taste flat if boiled plain, and the sauce alone will not carry the seasoning.
- YieldTwo cups of cut parsnips is roughly three-quarters of a pound of trimmed root, enough for two or three as a side dish.
- DrainingLet them steam dry in the colander for a minute before saucing. Wet parsnips thin the drawn butter and it separates.
Parsnips were a staple root long before the potato displaced them in northern Europe, valued because frost in the ground converts their starch to sugar, so they came out of the winter garden sweeter than they went in. Drawn butter sauce is a workhorse of American cookery of this period: a flour-thickened butter-and-water sauce that appears repeatedly in Fannie Farmer's book over boiled fish, asparagus, beets and cauliflower. The pairing here is characteristic of the Boston Cooking School approach, which built its vegetable chapter out of a small set of interchangeable sauces applied by rule rather than by inspiration. The name is often explained as butter "drawn" or melted, though the term was already vague enough in the nineteenth century that English and American writers used it for quite different sauces.