That’s the number, in square feet, of the land that Michael Docter grew parsnips for Clover on. He just wrote to me with the exact number. It’s a little over half an acre. Or half a football field. Any way you measure it, it’s a lot of parsnips. Michael has been growing for Clover for years, but this is the first year that we are selling so much food that Chris needed to tell him how many fields to grow for us back in September when he was planning for the following spring.
We’ll be launching the Spring-Dug Parsnip Sandwich on Monday. It has a spring onion relish (a condiment called chow-chow, I think Rolando learned about it from Emeril when he worked for him in New Orleans), Grafton cheddar, mayo, parsnips that we roast in the oven and heat up at locations, and young spinach.
Spring parsnips are the first thing to come out of the ground in New England. They are sweeter than fall parsnips because cold weather makes vegetables turn starch into sugar as a survival instinct (because sugar molecules interfere with the freezing process). Michael knows about this nifty fact, and takes advantage of it to produce the best-tasting parsnips in all of New England. They’re like candy.