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Boiled Parsnips
Rub and wash some parsnips well, but do not scrape them, put them in a saucepan with boiling salted water and boil until tender, which will take from one hour to one hour and a half, according to their size. When done rub their skins off with a rough cloth, put them in a hot dish, and serve with butter sauce, seasoned with a little pepper and salt poured over them.
A plain vegetable dish from the Waldorf's kitchen, and one where the modern cook should ignore the clock as printed.
- The timing is the main problemAn hour to an hour and a half will reduce today's parsnips to sweet mush. Whole medium roots need about 20-30 minutes in boiling water; test with a knife tip at 20. Older market parsnips were often far larger and coarser than the trimmed ones sold now.
- Why the skins stay onBoiling unpeeled reduces the loss of sugars to the water and keeps the flesh from taking up water, and the skin slips off afterwards under a cloth. Worth keeping even with the shorter cooking time — hold them in a folded towel and rub while still hot.
- The woody coreA thick parsnip may have a fibrous central core. Split the thick end lengthwise once the skins are off and lift it out.
- "Butter sauce"In cookery of this period the term usually meant drawn butter, a flour-thickened butter sauce rather than plain melted butter: roughly 1 tablespoon each butter and flour cooked together, thinned with about a cup of the cooking water or milk and finished with more butter. Melted butter with pepper will serve.
- Salting the waterSalt generously — roughly a tablespoon per 4 quarts. Parsnips are sweet enough that unsalted ones taste flat no matter what sauce goes over them.
- YieldOscar gives no quantity. Reckon about 1½ lb of parsnips for four as a side dish, and warm the serving dish as instructed; parsnips lose heat quickly.
Parsnips were a staple root of European kitchens long before the potato displaced them, valued because cold in the ground converts their starch to sugar — which is why they were traditionally left in the row until after a hard freeze and treated as a late-winter vegetable. Oscar Tschirky, whose name the book carries, was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and by his day the parsnip had settled into the plain-boiled-vegetable category in American hotel cookery: useful, cheap, unglamorous, and served under a flour-thickened butter sauce like a dozen other roots. Directions to boil roots unpeeled are common in nineteenth-century cookbooks, the usual reasoning being that peeling first let flavour escape into the water.