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Fried Parsnips
Scrape the parsnips, and boil them gently until tender, usually an hour. Drain, and when cold, cut them in long, thin slices about one-third of an inch thick, and season each slice with salt and pepper; dip the slices in melted butter and then in flour, and fry in hot lard until both sides are thoroughly browned. Drain well, and serve.
A two-stage method: boil, cool, then fry. The cooling step is the one that matters, and the recipe gives no quantities at all.
- Quantity and yieldReckon on about 1 1/2 lb of parsnips to serve four as a side dish. Choose medium roots; large ones develop a woody core that should be cut out before slicing.
- Boil them wholeScraping and boiling whole, rather than slicing first, keeps the roots from waterlogging. An hour is right only for thick old parsnips; young ones are tender in 20 to 30 minutes, tested with a skewer.
- Let them go coldThis is the hinge. Warm boiled parsnip is soft and wet, and slices will collapse in the pan. Thoroughly cold, they firm up and take a crust, which is why the recipe specifies cutting them only 'when cold'.
- Butter then flourThe melted butter appears to be doing the job a beaten egg does in other coatings, giving the flour something to cling to. Dip and drain briefly so the coating is thin; a heavy flour jacket turns pasty.
- LardStill sold, and it fries cleanly; its smoke point of roughly 370F is adequate for shallow-frying, though lower than most refined oils. Any neutral frying oil works. The recipe says only 'hot lard'; by modern practice, about a quarter inch deep at around 350F, and do not crowd the pan.
- Slice thicknessOne-third of an inch is generous by modern habit but correct here: thinner slices dry out before the outside colours.
- SeasoningSalt the slices before flouring, as written, but expect to need a second pinch after draining, since some salt is lost to the coating and the fat.
Parsnips were a staple sweet root in British and American kitchens long before the potato displaced them, valued because frost improves them: cold weather converts some of the root's starch to sugar, which is why the vegetable belongs to the winter table and why fried slices caramelise so readily. Boiling first and frying after is often said to have been common nineteenth-century practice for firm roots, and it doubled neatly as a way to use up yesterday's boiled vegetables. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued cookery titles over several decades in that same spirit of practical domestic instruction, at a time when parsnips still held a regular place in the vegetable chapter rather than the specialty aisle.