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Parsnips
Boil until tender in a little salted water; then take up; skim them, cut in strips, dip in beaten egg, and fry in melted butter or hot lard.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment of a root that most modern cooks only roast. The instructions are terse but complete; two words need decoding and one step needs help.
- "Skim them" means skin them"Skim them" is almost certainly a misprint for "skin them" -- parsnips boiled whole in their skins peel easily while hot, the skin slipping off cleanly. Peeling before boiling also works, though a little sweetness is lost to the water.
- Choose medium rootsLarge winter parsnips develop a woody, fibrous core that no amount of frying will soften. Halve a thick root lengthwise and cut the core out before boiling, or buy roots no thicker than about 1 1/2 inches at the crown.
- Boiling time"Tender" is roughly 20 to 30 minutes for whole medium roots in simmering salted water, tested with a skewer; considerably less if they are cut up before boiling. Boiled to collapse they will not hold their shape in the pan; stop while they still have some resistance.
- Dry before dippingThe hinge of the dish. Boiled parsnips come out wet and the egg will slide off and scramble in the fat. Drain them, let the steam dry off for a few minutes, then dip. A light dusting of flour before the egg makes the coating hold reliably.
- The fatWhole butter alone will brown and burn before the coating sets; use clarified butter, lard, or half butter and half neutral oil. Shallow-fry over medium-high heat, two or three minutes a side until the egg is set and gold.
- SeasoningThe recipe salts only the cooking water. Salt and pepper the beaten egg, and season again when the strips come out of the pan.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 lb of parsnips and two eggs serves four as a side dish. Serve straight from the pan; the coating softens as it stands.
Parsnips were a far more important vegetable in the nineteenth-century American kitchen than they are now, and books of this period treat them as a staple winter root rather than a curiosity. They keep well in a cellar and sweeten in cold ground, which is why the old advice was to leave the crop in the earth over winter and lift it as needed — the starch converts to sugar in the cold, and that sugar is what browns so readily in the frying pan here. Boiling first and then dipping in egg and frying was a common way to make a bland cellar vegetable interesting at table. The Home Cook Book was assembled from contributions by householders rather than by a single professional author, and the instructions have a compressed, assume-you-know-this style.