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Creamed Parsnips
Scrape the parsnips, and boil them until tender. Drain and cut them into small pieces. Place these e
A plain white-sauce vegetable dish of the sort that filled the vegetable chapter of every American cookbook around 1900. The text here breaks off mid-instruction, but the method is standard and easily completed.
- What the missing lines saidWhat the missing lines probably said -- Almost certainly the cut parsnips go into a saucepan with a thin white sauce (about a spoonful each of butter and flour to each cup of milk), are seasoned with salt and pepper, and heated through. That is the standard construction for creamed vegetables in cookbooks of this period.
- Choose the roots carefullyLook for parsnips no thicker than about 2 inches at the crown. Large ones develop a hard, fibrous core that stays woody however long you boil it; if the core resists a knife, cut it out before creaming.
- Scrape, then boilScraping rather than peeling was the older practice, the skin being thin; the claim that the sweetness lies just beneath it is traditional kitchen lore. A vegetable peeler does the same job. Boiling before cutting, as the sequence here implies, helps keep them from waterlogging.
- TimingWhole medium parsnips take 20-30 minutes in salted water; quartered lengthwise, 10-15. They should yield to a knife tip but not collapse, since they still have to be turned in sauce.
- Sauce consistencyAim for a sauce that coats rather than pools. Parsnips shed a little water as they sit in it, so make the sauce slightly thicker than seems right and let it loosen.
- SeasoningParsnips are sugary and take assertively to pepper, nutmeg or a spoonful of mustard. The original's plain salt-and-pepper treatment is period-correct, though it can taste flat to a modern palate.
- YieldTwo pounds of parsnips with about a cup and a half of sauce serves four to six as a side.
Parsnips were a staple winter root in Britain and North America long before the potato displaced them, valued because frost in the ground converts their starch to sugar, so the crop could be left in the field and dug as needed through winter. By the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book, generally placed around the turn of the twentieth century, the parsnip was by most accounts already sliding down the social scale, and creaming it in a white sauce was one of the standard ways of making a homely root fit for a served table. The vegetable chapters of that era are full of the same construction, since a competent white sauce was treated as the basic accomplishment from which dozens of dishes were spun. Butterick, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, published domestic manuals as part of the same business of instructing the middle-class household in how things ought to be done.