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Parsnip Fritters
Wash and cook parsnips in boiling water 15 minutes; remove the skins, mash; season with salt, pepper and butter. Flour the hands or dip them in cold water and shape the mixture into small cakes. Dip these cakes in flour and fry in hot fat. 1 quart peas cup pork
A plain wartime-era vegetable cake that depends almost entirely on how dry the mash is. Everything else is technique you already have.
- Dry the mashThe hinge of the recipe. Parsnips hold a great deal of water, and a wet mash will slump in the pan and absorb fat. Drain them thoroughly, then return the pot to low heat for a minute or two to steam off the surface moisture before mashing.
- Fifteen minutes is for cut parsnipsWhole mature parsnips will not be tender in a quarter hour. Cut them into two-inch lengths, halving or quartering thick ends, and expect 12-20 minutes depending on size. Older roots have a fibrous core that should be cut out after cooking.
- Skins after cookingBoiling first and slipping the skins off afterwards, as written, works and wastes less than peeling raw. The skins come away easily once the roots are soft enough to mash.
- Hot fatThe original says only 'hot fat.' Shallow-frying in roughly a quarter inch at about 350-375F suits these cakes: much cooler and they drink oil, much hotter and the outside colours first. The mixture is already cooked, so you are only browning.
- BindingThe original has no binder worked into the mixture at all; the flour is only for the hands and for coating the outside. If the cakes want to break, a beaten egg worked into the mash will hold them without much affecting the flavour, and chilling the shaped cakes for twenty minutes firms them further.
- The stray line at the end'1 quart peas cup pork' is a fragment of another recipe that has ended up here in the text. It is not an ingredient in this recipe; ignore it.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. As a guide, about two pounds of parsnips will make roughly eight to ten small cakes, enough for four as a side dish. Serve straight from the pan, drained on paper.
Parsnips were a winter staple in the American and British kitchen long before the potato displaced them, valued because they store well in the ground through frost and because cold improves them, converting starch to sugar. That sweetness saw them used in sweet dishes and in country wines in older cookery. Frying a mashed, already-cooked vegetable into small cakes was standard thrift practice: it made a second meal out of leftovers and stretched a small amount of fat across a whole dish. Cook books issued by insurance companies and similar institutions in the early twentieth century, distributed free to policyholders, did carry a good deal of this kind of cheap, filling vegetable cookery, presented with an eye to household economy rather than to the table of a fashionable house.