Parsnips

No single vegetable speaks more to me of growing up than parsnips. They came alongside roast potatoes, seemingly every Sunday lunch. Their scrawny little tails, sweet and chewy alongside the crunchy, crumblier potatoes. I loved them. I assumed everyone else did too.

I was wrong.

The parsnip, more than perhaps any other winter staple, needs the cold, specifically the transformative magic of the frozen morning’s frost. Its time spent sub zero transforms starchy reserves into the more appealing sucrose.

I get a sort of Protestant morality off the sweet winter roots. There’s a kind of failed idealism about providing for our sweet teeth through fields of sugar beet and boiled down parsnips. An idealism that failed in a market place saturated with artificially cheap sugar from the Indies, the blood of slavery and colonial ambition staining our tables instead.

While it’s a root with strong European history (the Romans may have been fans) it’s become a root of the North, with the French and Italians considering it more fit for swine than the table (I’m attributing this to the lack of sufficiently cold nights leaving the roots unappealing and starchy). The roots themselves seem to speak of a different generation, wrinkled nicotine stained skin and knobbled arthritic knuckles. Their flavour is creamy and mildly nutty; a touch of celeriac-like herbaceousness but with a muted earthiness that brings to mind awkward dinner table formality.

What do we do with them, and more importantly what do we drink when we’re doing it? Herein lies the rub: very little. Aside from my cherished memories of Sunday lunches it occurred to me that I could think of very few other contemporary parsnip recipes.

One such preparation is that like celeriac before it, parsnips are often ‘spiced’ in soups. Ham fisted appropriations of South Asian countries’ imagined spiced blends quite often doing the ‘spicing’. This means we complement the earthy herbaceousness of the parsnip with a host of ‘brighter’ flavours: ginger, shallot, garlic, green chilli, lemongrass and coriander.

I’m wary of lingering too long on parsnip soups so a simpler approach to pairing is fitting. Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc is likely to have the right kind of herbaceousness to match the green chilli’s fruitiness, plus the few grams of residual sugar it hides will get along nicely with low background heat. Looking for something a bit more restrained? A Pinot Blanc (Alsace or Alto Adige) would be a lovely, understated partner; lightly textured with delicate aromatics to complement, not argue with, the more strident chilli/ginger/coriander notes.

The other common parsnip preparation involves its elevation as a side dish with a brushing of honey (or similar sweetener). This always feels a bit American to me, placing it in the company of sweet potatoes with a marshmallow crust. However, it does noticeably change the inflection of the central dishes’ pairing.

A traditional Sunday lunch is a good example of one where the parsnip’s preparation can change the pairing. When the parsnips are plainly roasted I feel the pull of tradition in the way of the Medoc. Roast them with a honey glaze and I’m wanting the extra richness and ripeness of a similar Cabernet blend but from Napa or Bolgheri.

Finally, the parsnip has had many ill advised stints as a sweet item. I myself once made a parsnip banana bread in homage to its service as fake banana during WW2. The less said about this the better, though I imagine a nicely aged Sauternes (15-20 years) would take your mind off the parsnip dessert long enough to render the experience quite pleasant.