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Fried Parsnips
Peel six medium parsnips, cut in one-and-a-half-inch pieces, then cut each in one-third-inch-square strips. Wash in cold water, place in saucepan and pour in enough hot water to cover, then add half a lemon and a teaspoon salt. Cover pan, let gently boil for forty-five minutes, drain, then place in a deep dish. Squeeze over the juice of half a lemon, adding a teaspoon chopped parsley, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper and two tablespoons oil, mix well and let infuse from thirty-five to forty minutes.
Prepare a frying batter, plunge parsnips into it, roll well, then drop in boiling fat and fry for ten minutes, turning with skimmer once in a while. Lift up, drain on a cloth, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A two-stage recipe: parsnips are boiled, marinated in a lemon-and-oil dressing, then battered and deep-fried. The old timings are the main thing to adjust.
- Boil far less than 45 minutesThird-inch batons of parsnip are tender in 8 to 12 minutes of gentle simmering. Forty-five minutes turns them to pulp that will collapse in the batter. Test with a knife tip and drain the moment they yield.
- The half lemon in the waterIt goes in whole, skin and all, most likely to help keep the parsnips pale. Fish it out before draining; the second half is squeezed over afterward.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for a dish that will be sealed in batter.
- The marinade is the pointThirty-five to forty minutes in lemon juice, oil, parsley and seasoning is what makes these worth the trouble. Drain and pat the pieces dry before battering or the coating will slide off in the fat.
- The batter is not givenAny plain frying batter works: about 1 cup flour, 1 egg, and enough milk, water or beer to reach heavy-cream consistency. A stiff batter will not cling evenly to short, wet pieces.
- Fat temperature and time'Boiling fat' is unspecified; by modern practice deep-frying is usually done somewhere around 350-375F. Already-cooked parsnips need only 2 to 4 minutes, until the batter is set and golden; ten minutes at that heat will scorch the coating and dry out the interior.
- Fry in batchesSix parsnips make more pieces than one pan can hold. Crowding drops the fat temperature and gives a greasy, pale crust. Drain on paper rather than a cloth and hold uncovered in a low oven.
- YieldSix medium parsnips serve four to six as a side dish.
Parsnips were a staple sweetener and winter root across northern Europe long before the potato displaced them, and by the early twentieth century they are often said to have settled into a slightly old-fashioned place on the table. The treatment in this recipe closely resembles the French method for salsifis frits or fried artichoke bottoms: parboil, steep in a lemon-and-oil marinade (a marinade à la grecque in spirit), then coat in pâte à frire and deep-fry. Filippini's International Cook Book assembles hundreds of such dishes from restaurant practice — a plain root vegetable given the full three-step treatment a professional kitchen would have applied to something far more expensive.