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Vegetables (Kettle or stewpan)
in the kettle or stewpan in which the parsnips were boiled, add enough milk to cover, and when the milk boils, thicken it slightly with a little flour wet to a smooth paste with cold milk. When the liquid is like cream, add butter, salt and pepper, and serve hot.
This is the tail end of a creamed parsnip recipe — the page picks up after the parsnips have been boiled and drained. What survives is a milk sauce built in the cooking pot, which is worth reading as a method even without the opening lines.
- What is missingThe lost opening presumably covered scrubbing, boiling and cutting up the parsnips before the milk goes in; the surviving text says only that they were boiled in the same vessel. No quantity or boiling time is given, so judge tenderness by piercing the root.
- Peel after boilingPeriod practice was often to boil parsnips whole and unpeeled, then slip off the skins and trim the woody core from large roots. This keeps them from waterlogging, and the cores of anything thicker than about two inches are genuinely fibrous.
- The flour paste"Flour wet to a smooth paste with cold milk" is a thickening wash, not a roux; the cold liquid is what stops lumps forming. The recipe has you stir it in once the milk has come to the boil. About 1 tablespoon flour to 1 cup milk gives a sauce that coats, though the recipe specifies only "a little."
- Do not boil hardMilk thickened with flour needs two or three minutes at a simmer to lose its raw starch taste, but a rolling boil in a shallow pan will catch and scorch on the bottom. "When the liquid is like cream" is the only doneness cue given and it is a good one.
- Butter lastThe butter goes in with the salt and pepper once the sauce has thickened, not at the start. A tablespoon or two suits this quantity.
- Using the parsnip potThe sauce is built in the vessel the parsnips were boiled in, which picks up whatever sweetness clings to it. The recipe says to add enough milk to cover, so drain off standing cooking water first or the sauce will be thin.
- SeasoningThe recipe calls simply for salt and pepper. White pepper will keep the sauce looking clean; nutmeg is a common modern addition to creamed roots, though this recipe does not call for it.
- YieldNo quantity is given; the yield depends entirely on how many parsnips were boiled. Best eaten straight from the pan, as the sauce tightens as it cools.
Parsnips were a far more important vegetable in nineteenth-century American and British kitchens than they are now, valued because they overwinter in the ground and sweeten with frost, arriving as one of the few fresh roots available in early spring. Creaming them — boiling, then finishing in a flour-thickened milk sauce — was a common treatment for mild vegetables in books of this period, and it explains why such a recipe can give the instruction in such shorthand: the technique was assumed knowledge, so only the specifics of the vegetable needed spelling out. Parsnips fell out of favour in the twentieth century as the potato and imported produce filled the winter gap, and have come back largely for roasting rather than for the pale, gentle treatment described here.