Extracted from Twitter, Recipes

Parsnip Pie

Backstory
Recipe

This recipe popped up on the local radar as a result of a prompt (or challenge?) on Twitter, back in the final days when the platform was still a place where actual enjoyable conversations occurred.* The fabulous food historian Paul Couchman (who is now with us over at the Bluesky end of things at @theregencycook.bsky.social) posed the interesting question in the tweet imaged to the right.

Paul Couchman's Parsnip Pie challenge at Twitter

Food tourists passing through this neighborhood in the 1600s noted in passing that “the Irish do feed much upon parsnips”, and our household would have been no exception to this rule over the last few years—partly due to much recent research surrounding a universe the creator of which has decided that potatoes don’t exist there. (Or at least are unknown. Reasons for this exclusion are discussed here.)

So I couldn’t resist rising to the bait… especially as I had some parsnips around at the time.

The first thing I did was pull the original documentation mentioned by Paul in his tweet. (While pausing briefly once again to mourn the loss of the other person referenced in the tweet, the excellent Glyn Hughes, who was the chief contributor to— and mastermind behind—the invaluable online Foods of England project.)

The recipe comes from what’s probably the best-known book of the famous English social historian Dorothy Hartley: her classic 1956 Food in England. It’s not a book we had on our shelf, but fortunately the UK side of Amazon has a Kindle edition.

The recipe, like a lot of others in this book, is spelled out in generalities rather than as a precise array of amounts and ingredients. Nonetheless, it was easy enough for a cook with some experience to follow, and extrapolate from. See the Recipe tab above for details, and a reproduction of what the Twitter thread about the recipe (and the resultant pie) looked like.

*Hence we’ve added a new category for posts that we’ve installed here to make sure they’re not lost when what once was Twitter finishes circling the drain and finally slides all the way down into some entirely new and awful dimension. I preserve the URL for / link to the original Twitter thread here while uncertain how long it’ll remain valid.

From the Twitter thread beginning on April 17, 2023:

I went back to the original cookbook (Hartley’s FOOD IN ENGLAND, happily available as a Kindle ebook) and pulled her recipe.

Parsnip Pie For February by Dorothy Hartley

So, taking it from the top: 4 large parsnips, totaling about 1.5kg… peeled, topped & tailed.

Parsnips, topped, tailed and peeled …Then cut in half both lengthwise and crosswise, the chunks then also halved.

Parsnips cut up smaller

…All of these boiled in well-salted water for 25-35 minutes, or until tender; then drained and allowed to dry in their steam.

…Mash them really well. At this point the original recipe calls for pushing them through a sieve… but if you prefer to avoid the drudgery, then take a stick mixer to them instead, or put them through the Cuisinart/Magimix until you’ve got a smooth puree.

Then pull together your mise-en-place. About 700g/20 fluid ounces of the puree: 20g/2-3 tsp of grated fresh ginger: the juice and zest of a lemon: ground fresh blade mace and cinnamon: 1 whole egg and one egg yolk. (Missing from this scene, but also to be included: 2 tablespoons honey, & a few grinds of nutmeg.)

…Now make this pastry dough recipe (it’s from BBC Food), increasing the amounts to about 10 oz flour and 6 oz butter (and increase the water too, of course… probably to 9-10 tbs of water, maybe more, depending on your flour.) This is so you’ll have enough for the lattice.

Line an 11-in/28cm flan/tart tin with the dough… (apologies for blurry image, camera setting slipped…)

Prick it, roll the rolling pin over the edges to trim it, and put the trimmings aside. (Those will be cut into your lattice strips.) Then into the parsnip puree, beat the ground spices, lemon juice & rind, & finally the beaten egg yolks & white. Spread these in the pastry case.

Using a pastry wheel, or a pizza cutter, or just a knife, cut the rolled out dough trimmings into strips and interlace them over the face of the tart. When the lattice is complete, press it down against the sides, trim again if necessary, and brush the dough with egg wash.

Lattice crust on the parsnip flan

(BTW, if you’ve never done a lattice, here’s a video from the King Arthur Flour people that shows how: youtu.be/vwQYd2ljw-4)

…Now preheat your oven to 180C / 360F and bake the tart for 45-50 minutes. If you’ve got a fan/convection oven, you might want to turn the tart halfway through the baking time. Then cool on a rack.

The baked parsnip pie

…And then, of course, if you’re completely lost to common sense, and it’s spring, and you’ve got primroses running amok on your property… you can do as the original recipe suggests and garnish the tart with them.

(Please note that the wild primrose is a protected plant in various jurisdictions [such as the UK]… so be careful only to do this with nursery- or store-bought primmies, or ones already growing in your garden.)

Parsnip pie decorated with garden-grown primroses