Peel some carrots and cut in small pieces. Boil in salted water until tender; drain. Brown 1 tablespoonful of flour in 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; add ½ cup of the water in which the carrots were cooked, 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar and a little sugar. Let all boil; then add the carrots and 1 cup of cooked peas, some chopped parsley and a pinch of pepper. Simmer ten minutes and serve hot.
A sweet-sour vegetable side in the Austrian style, built on a browned flour roux rather than cream. The recipe assumes you can judge the quantity of carrots yourself; everything else is fixed.
- Quantity of carrotsThe original names no amount. Roughly a pound of carrots, about six medium, cut in ½-inch dice or short batons, will suit the quantity of sauce; the figure is an estimate.
- Save the cooking waterYou need ½ cup of it for the sauce, so drain the carrots over a bowl. Plain water or stock works, but the carrot water is what gives the sauce its sweetness and colour.
- Browning the flourThis is the hinge. Cook the flour in the butter over medium heat until it smells nutty and turns the colour of light caramel, 3 to 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Pull it off the heat the moment it darkens past that; scorched flour turns the whole dish bitter.
- Adding the liquidWhisk the hot carrot water in off the heat, then the vinegar, or the roux will seize into lumps. The sauce should coat a spoon, not pool.
- Vinegar and sugarTwo tablespoons of vinegar is assertive by modern taste. A mild white wine or cider vinegar suits it, and 'a little sugar' probably means a teaspoon or two — start small and adjust so the finish reads pleasantly sharp rather than pickled. The book does not say which vinegar to use.
- The peas"1 cup of cooked peas" could mean fresh-shelled, dried or canned peas, all in use when the book was written. A cup of frozen peas, thawed, is the closest modern match and needs no pre-cooking here.
- The final simmerTen minutes is enough to glaze already-tender carrots and thicken the sauce. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir gently, or the peas break up and the carrots go to mush.
- SaltOnly the boiling water is salted; the sauce gets none. Taste and season at the end, particularly if you used unsalted butter.
- YieldServes about four as a side dish. Best hot from the pan, as the recipe directs.
The sweet-sour vegetable treatment here — browned butter-and-flour roux, a splash of vinegar, a pinch of sugar — is the backbone of Central European home cooking, where it appears under names like Einbrenn or braune Einbrenne in Austrian and Bohemian kitchens and gets used on everything from green beans to lentils to cabbage. Calling the dish "Viennese" told an American reader of the period exactly that: not the cream-and-nutmeg carrots of a French-influenced table, but something darker and sharper. Books like this one, arranged as a dish a day with a different nation attached to each, were part of a broader enthusiasm for cataloguing foreign cookery for the middle-class household, and the attributions are best read as impressions rather than provenance.