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Carrots
Boil, without peeling, two hours; remove their skin; cut them in slices, and serve with butter and salt on them.
A bare instruction of the kind that assumes the cook already knows what a pot of boiling water looks like. The only real problem is the timing.
- Two hours is far too longWhole carrots of the size sold today are tender in 20-30 minutes; young ones in 10-15. A time like this was probably meant for large, overwintered field carrots with dense woody cores; applied to modern stock it produces waterlogged mush. Test with a skewer at 20 minutes.
- Why cook them unpeeledThe skin keeps the carrot from leaching sugar and colour into the water, and it slips off easily once cooked. Rub it away with a cloth or the back of a knife while the carrots are still warm.
- Salt the waterThe recipe salts only at the table. A well-salted pot seasons the carrot through, and you will need less butter and salt on the plate.
- Cut after cooking, not beforeSlicing first increases the surface area exposed to the water and washes out flavour. The order given here is worth keeping.
- Butter and saltAdd the butter while the carrots are hot enough to melt it and toss so each slice is coated. A grind of pepper or a little chopped parsley is within the spirit of the dish.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no quantity. For four people, reckon on about 1 1/2 lb and boil them whole in a wide pan so they sit in a single layer.
Boiled carrots with butter is the plainest form of a vegetable that cookery long treated as a winter staple rather than a delicacy. Carrots stored well in sand or a root cellar and were pulled out through the cold months, by which time they were large, tough and considerably less sweet than a carrot lifted in summer, which is why older books routinely call for boiling times that look absurd now. The instruction to cook them in their skins and peel afterwards is old practical wisdom, still repeated for beetroot for the same reason: the skin holds in colour and sugar. Domestic manuals of this kind tended to give vegetables a line or two each and reserve their detail for meat and pastry, so the terseness here is typical rather than careless.