Part 23

=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.

PEA DISHES.

=To Boil Peas= (Green Peas).--The one way to cook an English marrow-fat pea in perfect condition is to boil it. Take one peck of peas, shell them, and without loss of time put them into a saucepan of boiling water with one tablespoonful of salt, a piece of soda no larger than a pea, and a sprig of mint, as soon as the water comes to the boiling point again, draw the pan back, so that the peas may not cook too fast or they will jump out of their jackets; this they will do if there is too much soda in the water.

Boil for twenty minutes to half an hour, pour into a hot colander, heap up on a drainer, put a piece of fresh butter on the top, cover the dish, and send them to table perfect. This is if the peas are grown in your own garden.

If the peas are bought, and probably field grown, put two lumps of sugar in the water--this will improve their flavour; they will also require boiling a little longer.

=Pease Pudding= (Split Peas).--Soak half a pint of split peas, wash, and sort them over. Dip a pudding-cloth in boiling water, flour it well, put in the peas, and tie up loosely, allowing room for them to swell, and boil for three hours. Serve with piquant sauce.

=Green Pea Salad.=--Drain a small can of peas, or one pint fresh-boiled green peas; add a little pepper and salt, and one and a half cups of broken walnut meats, moisten with mayonnaise dressing, and serve on a bed of lettuce leaves.