Parsnips

Appears in
A Canon of Vegetables

By Raymond Sokolov

Published 2007

  • About

Fine words butter no parsnips, yes, but this neglected umbellifer deserves as much praise as possible. Pastinaca sativa has a flavor midway between sweet and earthy. Eclipsed after the potato took hold in Europe and abundant refined sugar made parsnip’s sweetening ability obsolete, the parsnip has hung on, because its fleshy, white carrotlike taproots are so delicious and easy to cook. Although you are unlikely to come upon parsnips on a foreign menu, here, just in case, is a parsnip lexicon: French panais; German Pastinake or Hammelmöhre (mutton carrot); Italian pastinaca; Portuguese and Spanish chirivia; Russian pasternak.* The English name implies a resemblance to turnip (“neep” being an old word and the current Scottish name for turnip).