Home › Salads › Viennese Carrots
Viennese Carrots
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 bunch carrots 1 tablespoonful flour 1/2 teaspoonful sugar 2 tablespoonfuls vinegar Salt and pepper to taste 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 1 cupful cooked peas Scrape carrots, cut in small pieces, and boil till tender in boiling salted water. Blend Crisco and flour together in saucepan over fire, stir in 1 cupful water in which carrots were cooked, boil five minutes, then add sugar, seasonings, vinegar, parsley, peas, and carrots; simmer ten minutes and serve hot in vegetable dish.
Apple, Celery and Nut Salad For Dressing 1 tablespoonful Crisco 1 teaspoonful mustard 1 teaspoonful sugar 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1/4 teaspoonful white pepper 2 eggs 4 tablespoonfuls lemon juice 1 cupful whipped cream
A simple sweet-sour braise of carrots and peas bound with a flour roux — Austrian home cooking filtered through an American shortening advertisement. A few notes before you start.
- The recipe runs into the next oneEverything from "Apple, Celery and Nut Salad" onward belongs to a different recipe and has nothing to do with the carrots. Stop at "serve hot in vegetable dish."
- CriscoThis book was published to sell it, so it appears in nearly every recipe. Butter is the better choice here and gives a rounder sauce; any neutral oil or shortening also works. Two tablespoons with one of flour makes a fairly loose roux, which is what you want.
- A bunch of carrotsUnspecified, but the proportions point to roughly a pound, or 6 to 8 medium carrots. That balances the cup of peas and the cup of sauce.
- Save the cooking waterThe sauce is built on the carrot water, not stock or milk. Drain the carrots over a bowl and measure out a full cup before you start the roux, or you will find yourself short.
- Boiling the carrotsCut in small dice they need 8 to 10 minutes, not longer — they get another ten minutes of simmering in the sauce at the end and will collapse if overcooked twice.
- The peasAt the time these would have been canned or long-boiled. Frozen peas need no precooking at all; add them in the last two or three minutes of the simmer so they stay green.
- Vinegar and sugarTwo tablespoons of vinegar against half a teaspoon of sugar is sharper than most modern palates expect. Add the vinegar in stages and taste — the sweetness of the carrots does some of the work, and older carrot varieties may have been less sweet than today's.
- Yield and servingServes four as a side. It is a hot vegetable dish, not a salad, despite sitting next to one on the page; it sits well beside roast pork, boiled beef or sausages.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911 — which is why a butter-based Austrian vegetable braise arrives here with shortening in the first line. The dish belongs to the family of flour-thickened Austrian and Bohemian vegetable dishes, the same technique that produces the cream-sauced peas, kohlrabi and green beans of home tables. The Einbrenn — a light roux slackened with the vegetable's own cooking liquid — is the signature of that kitchen, and the pinch of sugar against a good slug of vinegar is the süß-sauer balance found across Central European cooking.