Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Parsnip Cakes
Parsnip Cakes
(Very old English recipe.) These do not taste of parsnips at all, and can be found still in the little country farms or cottages.
Boil 3 parsnips until tender, mash and press through a sieve, mix in proportions of 1 teacupful to 1 quart of hot milk, 1/2 pint of yeast, some salt, and flour to make a stiff batter. Cover, set in a warm place, and when risen to twice its size, knead into flat cakes, very thin. These must rise again and be baked until brown. Can be eaten with butter, like crumpets or scones, or with gravy, like Yorkshire pudding, with a roast of meat.
A yeast-risen flatbread stretched with mashed parsnip, written down before anyone bothered to state quantities of flour or oven heat. The proportions given are for a farmhouse batch and want halving or quartering.
- Cool the milk firstA quart of hot milk poured onto yeast will kill it. Scald it if you like, then let it drop to about 110F before the yeast goes in — this is the step that decides whether the batch rises at all.
- Half a pint of yeastThat means liquid barm or ale yeast, roughly the consistency of thin cream and far weaker than modern yeast. For a quart of milk use about 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast, or one 7g sachet, and expect the first rise to take an hour or two rather than overnight.
- A teacupfulTake it as about 3/4 cup of sieved parsnip purée per quart of milk. Older teacups ran small, and anywhere between 1/2 and 1 cup will behave the same way here.
- Flour to make a stiff batterFor a full quart of milk this will take a great deal of plain flour; the recipe gives no figure because purées and flours vary. Add it gradually until the dough pulls away from the bowl and can be kneaded — parsnip purée varies a great deal in wetness.
- Press the parsnips through a sieveNot optional. Parsnips have a fibrous core, and unsieved mash leaves strings through the crumb. Three medium parsnips give a little over a cup of purée.
- Baking"Baked until brown" is all the recipe gives. Thin flat cakes of this kind were often cooked on a bakestone or griddle over the fire, though a bread oven would serve. On a dry griddle over medium heat, 3 to 4 minutes a side; in a hot oven on a preheated tray, about 8 minutes. Roll them genuinely thin, as instructed, or they turn bready.
- Second riseOnce shaped, give them 20 to 30 minutes covered. Thin cakes prove quickly and will go slack and holey if left much longer.
- YieldThe full quantity makes something like two dozen thin cakes. A quarter batch — one parsnip, a cup of milk, about 2 cups of flour — makes six and is the sensible place to start.
Root vegetables in bread dough are often said to have been an economy in northern Europe long before the potato arrived: parsnips, and later potatoes, add moisture and a faint sweetness while sparing expensive flour, and they keep the finished cake soft for a day or two longer than flour alone would. Parsnips were England's chief sweet root before sugar beet and imported cane became cheap, used in wine, in sweetened puddings and in Lenten cookery, so the author's insistence that the cakes "do not taste of parsnips at all" reflects a later palate that had come to think of the parsnip as strictly savoury. The book's framing — an old recipe still to be found in country cottages — is typical of collections that gathered rural survivals with a certain antiquarian appetite. Serving the cakes either buttered like crumpets or under gravy like Yorkshire pudding may hint at a griddle-bread manner of cooking, where the bakestone did the work of an oven, though the recipe itself says only "Very old English recipe."