A parsnip is a root vegetable. The part you eat grows underground: thick, pale, and shaped a little like a carrot, but white or creamy yellow, not orange. When you cook it, it turns sweet — sweeter than a carrot, with a warm, almost nutty taste. People roast it, mash it, or put it in winter soup. In Britain it is an ordinary cold-weather food, often next to a Sunday roast; in many other places you mainly meet it in Western cooking. It is not hot or spicy. The leaves are not what you buy. Gardeners grow it for the root, and you pull it up after frost, which makes it sweeter. People sometimes stretch the word to any pale root that looks similar, but a true parsnip is its own plant, not a white carrot.