Home › The World's Kitchen › Puree of Parsnips
Puree of Parsnips
Peel and finely slice six fresh, sound medium parsnips and plunge in a pint boiling water for ten minutes. Drain on a sieve, then place in saucepan with a finely sliced onion, two sliced leeks, an ounce butter, and let gently cook for fifteen minutes, stirring quite frequently. Add two ounces flour, stir well, then pour in two and a half quarts white broth and add two sliced, peeled, raw potatoes. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, a branch chervil, sprig thyme, bay leaf, clove, and add to soup. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and thoroughly mix for one minute. Cover pan, let gently boil for an hour and a half, press soup through sieve into a basin, then through Chinese strainer into a saucepan. Add a pint milk, mix well, boil for five minutes, pour puree into a soup tureen, add bread croutons and serve.
A classic flour-thickened vegetable puree in the French style, sized for a household or a boarding table — two and a half quarts of broth plus a pint of milk yields roughly 3 quarts, or 10 to 12 servings. Halve it comfortably.
- White brothThis is fond blanc: unroasted veal or chicken bones simmered with aromatics, pale and lightly gelatinous. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute, and it should be unsalted, since the recipe's teaspoon of salt assumes a plain broth reduced over 90 minutes.
- Blanching the parsnipsThe ten minutes in boiling water is not enough to cook them through; it is usually done to take off some of the sharp, earthy edge older parsnips can carry. With sweet modern supermarket parsnips it can probably be skipped, though it does no harm. Note the recipe calls for only a pint of water, barely enough to cover.
- Don't brown the rouxThe whole point of the gentle fifteen minutes with butter, onion and leek is to soften without colour. Once the flour goes in, keep the heat low and stir; two ounces of flour to two and a half quarts of liquid is a light thickening that will scorch on the pan bottom if pushed.
- An ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. It is a lean amount of fat for two ounces of flour, so the roux will be sandy rather than smooth — expected, and it hydrates once the broth goes in.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. The two-stage straining — coarse sieve to break the vegetables down, then chinois to catch fibre — is worth keeping, as parsnip cores stay stringy. A blender followed by one pass through a fine sieve gets you to the same place faster.
- TimingAn hour and a half of gentle boiling is longer than the vegetables need; they are soft in 30 to 40 minutes. The pan is covered, so little liquid is lost. Simmer until tender, then taste and reduce only if it seems thin.
- The milk at the endAdd it after straining, as directed, and give it only the five minutes stated. Milk boiled hard in a flour-bound soup catches on the pan and can break; low heat and a whisk are enough.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. Leave it out rather than substituting — a little extra parsley and, if you like, a few fennel fronds come closer than tarragon, which will dominate.
Parsnips were among the sweet roots of the European kitchen garden before the potato and before sugar beet, valued through winter because cold in the ground converts some of their starch to sugar. In America they had come to be associated with stock feed and with plain country cooking, and this preparation dresses the root in the full French soup grammar: blanch, sweat in butter with onion and leek, bind with a white roux, moisten with fond blanc, infuse with a tied bouquet garni, then sieve, finish with milk and send it out with croutons. The pattern follows the standard purees of the professional repertoire of the period, where any vegetable could be run through the same sequence and named accordingly; potato appears here not for flavour but as a second thickener that gives the puree body.