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Stewed Parsnips
Wash, scrape, and slice about half an inch thick; have a skillet prepared with a half pint hot water and a table-spoon butter, add the parsnips, season with salt and pepper, cover closely, and stew until the water is cooked away, stirring occasionally to prevent burning. When done, the parsnips will be of a creamy, light brown color.-Mrs. D. B.
A short, honest braise-then-glaze: the parsnips cook in the water, then the water goes and the butter browns them. Two things decide whether it works — the age of the roots and how close you watch the pan at the end.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup in US measure. In a 10-inch skillet that is roughly enough to come a third of the way up a single layer of sliced parsnips, which is what you want; a crowded pan steams unevenly.
- The hinge is the last two minutesOnce the water has boiled off, the butter is left in a hot dry pan with sugary root vegetable. That is where the "creamy, light brown color" comes from and also where it burns. Stay with it, stir constantly, and pull the pan the moment the edges take colour.
- "Skillet" here means a lidded panIn an 1883 kitchen this would most likely have been a heavy cast-iron pan with a close-fitting cover. Any wide sauté pan with a lid works; heavy-bottomed is genuinely better, since thin pans scorch the sugars before the parsnips soften.
- Quantity and yieldNo amount is given. Reckon on 1½ to 2 lb of parsnips for the stated water and butter, serving four as a side. Scale the butter up if you go heavier — a tablespoon will not glaze three pounds.
- Peel and coreNineteenth-century parsnips were often large and overwintered. Modern supermarket roots need only scraping, but anything thicker than about two inches across has a woody central core worth cutting out before slicing.
- TimingHalf-inch slices are tender in 15 to 20 minutes of covered cooking. If the water disappears before they yield to a knife, add a splash more rather than pressing on — the browning stage should begin with the parsnips already cooked through.
- SeasoningSalt at the start, as written. Pepper is arguably better held back until the end, since it can turn acrid in a dry hot pan.
Parsnips were a standard winter root in American kitchens well into the nineteenth century, valued because they keep in the ground through frost and in fact sweeten with it — the plant converts starch to sugar in cold weather, which is why this recipe browns as it does with no sugar added. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) belongs to the era of community-contributed cookery, where recipes arrived from named or initialed local women; "Mrs. D. B." is one of dozens of such attributions in the book, and the terse, assumed-knowledge style is typical of a contributor writing for other experienced cooks rather than for beginners. Parsnips fell out of favour in the United States over the twentieth century, which is why a dish this ordinary in 1883 now reads as a revival.