The Twentieth Century Home Cook Book

Practical recipes and household wisdom from 1906 — when the icebox was high technology and dinner had nine courses.

HomeVegetables › Spring Carrots

Spring Carrots

Scrape well and boil in salted water until tender. Pour over them white sauce, adding a little chopped parsley and lemon juice.

For the Modern Kitchen

A bare-bones vegetable side of the sort these books printed by the hundred, assuming the cook already knew how to make white sauce. The only real decisions are size and cooking time.

A Little History

Carrots dressed in a butter-and-flour sauce with parsley and lemon is the standard English and American treatment of a spring vegetable, and its brevity here is telling: turn-of-the-century household cookbooks printed white sauce once, near the front, and then referred back to it for the rest of the vegetable chapter. "Spring carrots" meant genuinely young roots, thinned early from the row and sold small and sweet, as distinct from the large keeping carrots that came out of the cellar in winter and were more often stewed or mashed. The lemon juice does double duty, brightening a bland sauce and countering the flat taste of milk cooked with flour, a trick common in period cookery long before anyone wrote about balancing acidity.

← CarrotsTo Stew Parsnips →