The Last Cry of the Parsnips
The original Beef Parsnip
Parsnips, before the advent of cane sugar from the Caribbean in the 18th century, were used as a sweetener. Parsnips were so valuable Emperor Tiberius permitted Germania to provide parsnips as tribute starting in AD 4. Major languages adopted words from parsnips. From the French, via English, “parley”, talking in a peaceful manner, came from the satisfaction induced by eating parsnips, from England, a “parsonage,” was the place that the son of a parsnip lived, reflecting the influence important parsnips had in the local community. And from Germany, even as late as the 19th century, Richard Wagner wrote “Parsifal,” the opera of Percival Parsnip’s search for the meaning of life. Like other vegetables that selflessly die for us, parsnips had an important role in society and enjoyed their role as martyrs to humans on buttered platters.
Thus, it is not so surprising that with the rise of cheap sugar imports from slave colonies in the New World that parsnips felt their position threatened. Pusillanimous Parsnip, from the well-known English village of ‘Small Bottom by Cuddly’ in the Midlands, organized a revolt. The year 1792 is remembered for the French Revolution, and not for Pusillanimous Parsnip’s stand for the retention of parsnips as the sweetener for the famous Parsnip Pudding[1] prepared for the investiture of the Lord Mayor of London. Sadly, not only did the rebellion fail, but the parsnip pudding slipped from being the centrepiece of a Sunday dinner.
Pusillanimous was small for a parsnip and studied for many hours, every day, discolouring from being out of the ground for so long. Yet his drive to protect parsnips from the insidious cane sugar interlopers won him a scholarship to Cambridge, that university for outsiders and non-conformists. Here he studied Nietzsche’s core philosophy, culinary arts, obtaining his doctorate for his seminal work “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”
More and more fields of parsnips were left to rot unharvested as sugar cane and that bastard off-shoot, beta vulgaris, the common beetroot[2], swept the cities and towns. Moral outrage drove Pusillanimous to organize the despondent parsnips. They marched on London, rows and rows of parsnips, legion upon legion, blocking the turnpikes. Alas, it was not to be! Parsnips were brutally rounded up in the streets of London, caught, cut, and boiled. As a cruel blade cut to his woody core, Pusillanimous cried, heroically, “Now I am Magnanimous!” Parsnips were to be removed from the collective memory. Only well-read vegetarians today know of the humiliation that parsnips suffered. Parsnips no longer talk and walk in our midst.
Most people do not know the biggest supporter of parsnips was the Duke of Wellington. Having written that “an army marches on its parsnips”, and “the army is composed of the parsnips of the earth”, he ordered beef for his men to be prepared wrapped with parsnips within pastry, calling it ‘Beef Parsnip.’ He did this in honour of parsnips’ loyalty and devotion. Pictures of the dish are attached, still prepared by the few who care for this dish[3]. It is the ultimate irony that the dish’s name today is the victor of the Battle of Waterloo rather than the intention of that hero to honour the legacy of such a faithful vegetable.
Pastry envelopes the parsnips as a shroud its corpse.
[1] In the 17th century Sir Kenelme Digbie unveiled the Queen of Puddings: breadcrumbs, milk and egg yolks, sweetened with parsnips, topped with meringue, and then baked till done.
[2] It was at this time that many a beetroot turned red, after growing in fields with the blood of so many innocent and abandoned parsnips.
[3] It is a delicious dish; prepare as for the more commonly known version of the dish, lightly frying the parsnips in butter before wrapping them in their shroud of rolled pastry.
Contributed by Nigel Scotchmer
