=To Boil Parsnips.=--Wash and scrape the roots, put them in salted,
boiling water to cover, and boil steadily for an hour to an hour and a
half, or even longer if they are very large. They may be served plain,
or covered with good white sauce. If very large, cut them in two or
four lengthwise before boiling.
=Parsnips Sauté.=--Boil and mash six or seven parsnips, sprinkle with
salt and pepper, and stir in one tablespoonful of flour and one egg.
Make them into round, small cakes, and fry in dripping or nutter,
turning occasionally until brown on both sides.
=Baked Parsnips.=--Boil until tender, peel, split, and put into a
baking pan, flat side down; sprinkle with sugar and bake until brown,
basting with melted butter and syrup.
=Buttered Parsnips.=--Scrape off the skins and boil the parsnips until
tender, and cut lengthwise in thin slices. Put into a saucepan, with
three or four tablespoonfuls of butter, pepper and salt and minced
parsley to season. Shake over the fire until the mixture boils, and
serve with white sauce poured over. A little cream may be added to the
sauce. Sprinkle the parsnips with minced parsley before serving.
=Parsnip Balls.=--Boil six large parsnips, cool, peel and grate; add
two eggs well beaten, and enough flour to bind the mixture together;
season to taste. Mould into small flat cakes and sauté in butter, or
shape into balls, first rubbing the hands with flour, and fry in a deep
fat.
=Parsnip Cakes.=--Peel and cut up three or four parsnips; cook until
soft in salted water; drain, chop finely, rub through a sieve. Season
with salt and pepper, and add the yolks of three eggs well beaten. Heat
thoroughly, adding a little flour, and cook to a stiff paste. Cool,
shape into small flat cakes, dip in egg and crumbs, and fry brown in
fat to cover.
=Escalloped Parsnips.=--(1) Prepare three parsnips according to
directions previously given, cutting the parsnips into dice. Put into
a buttered baking dish in layers, sprinkling each layer with chopped
onion. Cover with crumbs, dot with butter, and bake for half an hour.
(2) Mash enough boiled parsnips to make a pint, and add two
tablespoonfuls each of butter and cream, one egg well beaten, and
a pinch each of salt and pepper. Put into a buttered baking dish
alternate layers of parsnip and crumbs, having crumbs on the top. Melt
one tablespoonful of butter in a quarter of a cupful of milk. Season
with salt and pepper, and pour over the parsnips. Bake until brown,
and serve in a baking dish. The layers of crumbs and the milk may be
omitted if liked.
=Fried Parsnips.=--(1) Peel the parsnips, and boil until tender in
salted water. Drain, and cut into half-inch slices lengthwise, or small
strips. Season with salt, and cool. Dip in hot molasses, and fry in
butter until brown, or dip in egg and crumbs and fry. Sprinkle with
brown sugar, and put into the oven for ten minutes.
(2) Boil parsnips, peel and cut into strips; sauté in butter, and
season with pepper, salt, and minced parsley and serve, or dip the
strips in a batter, made of half a cupful of flour, two eggs, one
tablespoonful of olive oil, salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg to season,
and enough milk to make the batter of the proper consistency. Fry in
deep fat.
GARDEN PEA (_Pisum sativum._ Ord. _Leguminosæ_).
As known to the gardener there are two main divisions of the green pea,
the round-seeded and the wrinkled, the field pea and the marrow-fat.
The first is hardier and earlier, may be sown in November, and with
luck and a good situation may be gathered at the end of May. But the
produce is distinctly second rate, and the small garden has room for
the best alone.
The wrinkled or marrow-fat pea, while not quite so hardy as its
humbler sister, is of a flavour that places it quite apart, and with
equal soil and chances it will probably be not more than ten days later
than the round-seeded variety.
The soil whatever its nature must be richly treated, and well dug. In
a light soil deep trenching and well-matured manure at the bottom of
the trench will enable the roots to go well down, and give them welcome
moisture and coolness in the heats of summer. It is this mechanical
effect of manure that gardeners with rich, deep loam to deal with
forget, when they recommend peas to be grown by use of artificial
manures alone. If lime be wanting in the soil a dressing should be
occasionally dug in, not as a yearly practice, as lime stays a long
while about, but say once every three years. Basic slag and kainit are
the chemical manures generally recommended for incorporating with the
earth at the time of trenching, though we think that good garden soil
can dispense with their frequent use. Certainly a slight sprinkling of
nitrate when the plants first appear is invaluable in starting them
into vigorous growth, and a fortnight or three weeks later a sprinkling
of superphosphate helps to produce a first-rate crop.
It is impossible to lay down any hard-and-fast rule for the times of
sowing, soil, situation, climate, and season are all factors that
decide the matter, and as the last is a varying one, no gardener can
say that every year his first sowing of peas shall go in on a certain
day, or even in a particular month.
In a sandy Surrey loam marrow-fat peas are generally sown with good
results about mid-February, giving good dishes about the 10th of June.
But there are seasons when it is impossible to hope for a sowing before
March. One consolation the gardener has, the March sowing is not
far behind the earlier; having more genial conditions from the very
beginning, it grows right away, and will not be more than a week later
than the earlier peas. Among the Yorkshire hills, where the subsoil
is a cold clay, the gardener will not waste time and seed by sowing
before the third week of March, and even then may prefer to begin
with a hardy, round-seeded sort. These may be considered the extreme
variations, and it must be a matter of yearly judgment when to begin
sowing, and what variety to sow.
For hot soils the selection of sorts is more difficult than for rich,
deep moisture-holding loams. The three varieties we have found best
in Surrey, in a gravelly loam, are Sutton’s Little Marvel, Abundance,
and Satisfaction. The Sherwood pea has also proved itself to be a most
excellent second early variety, but it will be found even better where
the soil is rather more retentive of moisture. In such a soil, it is a
typical small garden pea, dwarf, an abundant cropper, and of excellent
marrow-fat flavour. But when the gardener is not restricted to short
varieties from reasons of space there are many splendid taller kinds,
such as “Duke of Albany,” and best of all peas grown, “Ne plus ultra.”
The great object of the small gardener is to maintain a succession
of peas over as long a period as possible, and for this purpose dwarf
peas are to be preferred, as they take up much less room on the
ground, and enable the gardener to make many sowings for succession in
his restricted space. The gardener is recommended to make a careful
study from year to year of the varieties best suited to his special
conditions, always bearing in mind the influence of the different
seasons on his experiments. Thus a rainy summer will give excellent
results with a seed to which a dry summer would prove fatal.
As far as experience goes, of all our garden produce the pea varies
in its constitution more than any other, except perhaps the potato.
Therefore a gardener beginning the study of vegetables in fresh ground
and new conditions is recommended to sow quite small quantities of many
sorts of pea from different growers, and to keep a note-book; flavour,
abundance, and liability to mildew being points to be considered, as
well as comparative earliness or lateness of cropping.
The first sowing of peas, in mid-February, should be of an early dwarf
variety, and made on a sunny, well-protected border; the peas should
be rolled in paraffin and red-lead as a matter of routine, in order to
protect them from birds and mice, and sown in drills three inches deep,
the drills as wide apart as the height the peas will grow to, but never
less than two feet distant. The drills should be about four inches
wide, and the peas set in double rows down each drill one and a half to
three inches between each seed, according to the variety. Two strands
of black cotton should be stretched an inch or so above the rows of
seed as a discouragement to the birds.
Gardeners habitually sow all seeds far too thickly, and peas especially
so. The earliest sowings should be sown more thickly than the later,
but two-thirds of a pint of seed should amply suffice for a row forty
feet long. Soot occasionally dusted over the growing leaves as they
push up will discourage the sparrows from utilising them as salad, and
will also disappoint the slugs. If the garden holds many of the latter
pests, soot should be thickly spread along each side of the rows.
Successive sowings are to be made; when the last sowing of seed shows
above ground, it is time to put in the next. With the third sowing of
earlies, a first sowing of second early peas should be made; the latter
take a week longer to come into bearing, and so the succession is
maintained. In hot soil it is not much use sowing after the second week
in May, and for this late sowing the ground must be dug very deeply and
an extra special dose of old manure buried. In favourable districts and
soil, peas sown at the end of the month and well into June will give
good results as late as September; a mildew-resisting variety should be
chosen, and the rows spaced widely apart, to ensure full circulation of
air round the plants.
Rows of peas should never be sown closer than the height they are
expected to attain. Catch crops of lettuce, spinach, radish, and so
forth may be grown between them, and even leeks may be put out between
the taller and more widely spaced sorts with advantage. Pea sticks are
an irritating little expense, and it will be found an economy to grow
peas up wire netting stretched along the centre of the row. This will
last many years, and soon repay the extra first cost. We are decidedly
of opinion that all peas, dwarf as well as tall varieties, should have
the support of sticks or wire netting, preferably the latter. Peas
grown on such supports do not lie about on the ground, but gain all the
sunshine and air available; they will fruit earlier and more abundantly
than if left to flop about on damp earth. Wire-netting can be purchased
in fifty-yard rolls; a roll of three feet width costs about seven
shillings, and one of half that width, quite tall enough for dwarf
peas, about three and sixpence.