Home › Vegetables › Creamed Parsnips
Creamed Parsnips
Scrape and boil till tender six mediumsized parsnips. Slice lengthwise, put back in skillet over fire and dress with two tablespoons butter, pepper and salt to taste, and add a little finely minced parsley. Stir until butter boils. Remove parsnips and lay in serving dish. Add to butter, three tablespoons cream in which has been dissolved a good pinch of cornstarch, allow to boil up well once, and pour over parsnips.
A straightforward vegetable dish whose only real trick is knowing when parsnips are done and getting the sauce to thicken without breaking.
- QuantitySix medium parsnips is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb, serving four as a side. Parsnips sold today are often larger than the recipe seems to assume; buy by weight rather than count.
- Boiling timePeeled whole parsnips take 15-25 minutes in salted water depending on thickness. Test with a knife tip at the thick end; overcooked parsnips collapse when you try to slice them lengthwise.
- Woody coresLarge late-season parsnips develop a fibrous core. After slicing lengthwise, cut it out with the tip of a knife; the original assumes smaller, younger roots.
- "Skillet over fire"A heavy frying pan over medium heat. The parsnips go back in dry, so keep the heat low enough that the butter foams rather than browns.
- The sauceThree tablespoons cream with a pinch of cornstarch is a very small amount of liquid — barely a glaze. Whisk the starch into the cold cream before it goes near the pan, and bring it to a boil once only, as the original says; prolonged boiling thins a cornstarch bond.
- Scraping versus peelingScraping with a knife was the usual older method; a vegetable peeler does the job. Parsnip skin is edible but can taste bitter on older roots.
- SeasoningParsnips are sweet, so they may take more salt than you expect; white pepper suits the pale sauce better than black if appearance matters.
Parsnips were a staple sweetener and winter root long before the potato displaced them from English and American tables, and they keep their sugars best after a frost — the old advice to leave them in the ground until winter is sound, since cold converts stored starch to sugar. By the time cookbooks of this kind were in circulation, parsnips had slipped to the status of an old-fashioned vegetable, redeemed mainly by butter and cream, as here. The dish belongs to a whole family of turn-of-the-century "creamed" vegetables — creamed onions, creamed celery, creamed carrots — in which a boiled vegetable is finished in a thin starch-bound cream sauce made in the same pan. Cornstarch rather than flour marks it as a slightly newer technique; boxed cornstarch was widely marketed to American households from the mid-nineteenth century onward.