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Baked Parsnips
5 parsnips Salt and pepper to taste Peel and wash parsnips and cut into two lengthwise, and steam for one hour. Remove from fire, lay in greased baking pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, spread Crisco over top and bake slowly till tender. Serve hot.
A plain two-stage parsnip dish: steam, then bake in fat. The only real problems are the steaming time and the fact that no quantity of fat is given.
- Cut the steaming timeAn hour of steaming will reduce most modern parsnips to mush before they ever see the oven. Halved lengthwise, they are tender at 12-18 minutes depending on thickness; steam only until a knife meets slight resistance, since the baking finishes them.
- "Bake slowly"The recipe gives no temperature; a slow oven is usually taken today as somewhere around 300-325F. At that temperature 25-35 minutes is enough to dry the surfaces and brown the edges. If you want more colour in less time, 400F for 20 minutes works and is closer to how roasted parsnips are treated now.
- How much CriscoThe recipe gives none. Two to three tablespoons, softened and spread over the cut faces, is right for five parsnips. Any solid shortening, butter or a neutral oil substitutes directly; Crisco is a vegetable shortening and behaves like any other in this role.
- Size and the woody coreFive parsnips is a vague measure, and the recipe gives no indication of size. Aim for about 1 1/2 lb. Large parsnips develop a fibrous central core; halve them lengthwise as directed and cut that core out if it feels tough.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 lb of parsnips serves four as a side dish.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper alone is the whole seasoning here, which suits the period. Parsnips are high in sugar and take well to a little black pepper applied after baking, when it has not had time to turn dusty in the oven.
The Story of Crisco was Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook for the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening it introduced in 1911, and its recipes exist chiefly to show the new fat doing everything lard and butter had done. That is why a dish as old and simple as baked parsnips appears at all: the parsnip was a long-standing winter root in Britain and North America, valued because it keeps in the ground through frost and grows sweeter for it, and it had been buttered and baked for centuries before anyone thought to spread shortening over it. The selling point was that a shelf-stable vegetable fat needed no cold storage, something that carried real weight in kitchens without reliable refrigeration.