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Parsnip Cakes
Use left-over boiled, buttered parsnips for making these cakes. Mash and season with salt and pepper, make into flat, round cakes, dip in flour, and sauté in hot melted beef-dripping or butter.
Use just enough fat to keep the cakes from sticking to the pan, as they must not be greasy. Green-Pea or Lima-Bean Soup Cook any left-over peas or Lima beans with a little cold water until soft. Strain, and for every cup of the purée use two cups of white sauce No. 1 (see page 67). Combine mixtures, thinning with hot milk if necessary. Serve with croutons (see page 149). Dried Lima beans may be used.
Two thrift dishes from the same page: a fried parsnip cake and a pea or bean purée soup. Both assume you already have cooked vegetables sitting in the cold pantry.
- The hinge: dry mashParsnips hold a great deal of water, and buttered leftovers hold more. Mash them and let the mash cool completely before shaping, otherwise the cakes slump in the pan and absorb fat instead of browning.
- Beef-drippingThe rendered fat saved from a roast. Any high-smoke-point fat works; the recipe allows butter alone, though butter browns quickly, so a mix of butter and oil is more forgiving.
- QuantitiesNone are given, which is normal for a leftovers book. Roughly a pound of cooked parsnips makes six to eight cakes, enough for three or four as a side.
- BindingThe flour coating is the only structure here. If the mash is loose, an egg yolk or a spoonful of mashed potato worked in will hold the cakes together without changing the flavour.
- White sauce No. 1The reference is to page 67, which is not reproduced here. In books of this period a first or thinnest numbered white sauce is usually around a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk, though the numbering varies from book to book. Two cups of sauce to one cup of purée gives a soup, not a chowder.
- Sieving the purée"Strain" means pushing the softened peas or beans through a sieve to leave the skins behind. A blender will not do the same job on pea skins; sieve afterwards if you want it smooth.
- Dried Lima beansThe note at the end assumes you will soak and boil them first, to the same softness as the leftover cooked beans. Allow several hours, or use canned butter beans, drained and rinsed.
- SeasoningBoth dishes are built from already-seasoned leftovers and then diluted with sauce or milk, so taste at the end rather than the beginning. Soups made this way almost always want more salt than expected.
Leftover cookery had its own small shelf of books in the era when domestic economy was a public virtue and refrigeration in the home was still a wooden icebox. The logic of this page is the logic of the whole genre: a cooked vegetable is a half-finished dish, and the second cooking should disguise the fact that it is a second cooking. Parsnips were a staple winter root long before they were a novelty, and are generally said to have been a chief source of sweetness and starch in northern European kitchens before the potato displaced them; boiled and buttered was their ordinary form, and the fried cake was one familiar way to give yesterday's roots a fresh surface. The soup follows the other great reclaiming technique of the period, the white sauce, which turned almost any purée into a soup and appears on page after page of household manuals as a numbered, cross-referenced foundation.