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Baked Parsnips
Peel and wash some large, hollow-crowned parsnips, cut them lengthwise into quarters, and steam them for one hour. Take them out and place in a baking-dish with a little salt and meat drippings, and bake till nicely browned. Drain, put them on a hot dish, and serve.
A plain side dish that needs only two adjustments: far less steaming, and an oven temperature the original never bothered to give.
- Cut the steaming timeAn hour of steam will reduce quartered parsnips to a wet collapse; older, coarser roots may have needed it, but supermarket parsnips are tender in 12 to 18 minutes. Steam only until a knife tip meets slight resistance, since they finish cooking in the oven.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated; cooks of the period judged the range by eye or feel rather than by a dial. For browning something already cooked, a hot oven of about 425F suits; 400F will also colour them, if a little more slowly.
- "Hollow-crowned"Hollow Crown is an old parsnip variety with a broad, sunken shoulder, once the standard market type. Any large parsnip works; simply choose ones of even thickness so the quarters cook at the same rate.
- Woody coresLarge parsnips often have a fibrous core that stays tough. After quartering, pare out any core that looks pale, dense and stringy.
- Meat drippingsBeef or pork dripping, or roast chicken fat, all suit the dish, and the recipe's phrasing suggests whatever fat the kitchen had to hand. Duck fat is a good modern stand-in; butter alone will darken before the parsnips brown.
- Turn themToss the quarters in the fat so they are coated on all sides, spread them in one layer, and turn once partway through. Crowded parsnips steam a second time instead of browning.
- Sugar burnsParsnips are high in sugar and go from golden to bitter quickly. Start checking at 20 minutes.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of parsnips, roughly four large roots, serves four as a side.
Parsnips were a staple winter root in Britain and the eastern United States long before the potato displaced them, valued because cold in the ground converts some of their starch to sugar and improves the flavour. By the time Oscar Tschirky compiled his book in 1896, the parsnip had slipped down the menu into the plain-vegetable pages, cooked in the drippings left from the roast, which is the household economy this recipe records. The variety name in the first line, Hollow Crown, was familiar to nineteenth-century seed buyers, though how far it was used as general shorthand for a good large root is not clear.