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Stewed Carrots
Take any quantity desired, divide the carrots lengthwise, and boil until perfectly tender, which will require from one to two hours. When done, have ready a sauce-pan with one or two table-spoons butter, and small cup cream; slice the carrots very thin, and put in the sauce-pan; add salt and pepper, and let stew ten or fifteen minutes, stirring gently once or twice, and serve in a vegetable dish. Some add more milk or cream; when done, skim out carrots, and to the cream add a little flour thickening, or the beaten yolks of one or two eggs. When it boils, pour over the carrots and Carrots may also be boiled with meat like turnips or parsnips, but they take longer to cook than either. - Mrs. C. T. C. serve.
A plain nineteenth-century vegetable dish that survives intact, apart from the boiling time, which reflects storage carrots far larger and older than anything sold today.
- Cut the boiling time hardOne to two hours applies to thick, overwintered field carrots. Split modern carrots lengthwise and they are tender in 10-20 minutes; test with a knife tip rather than the clock.
- "Small cup" creamThe recipe gives no measure; a small teacup, somewhere around 100-150 ml, is a reasonable reading. Any cream from single to heavy works; the higher the fat, the less likely it is to break in the pan.
- The egg-yolk finishYolks work as a liaison rather than a boiled thickener. The original's "when it boils" is printed to cover both options, but it can only safely be followed for the flour version: temper the yolks with a ladle of hot cream, return them off the heat, and hold the pan below a simmer or the sauce will curdle.
- Flour thickening"A little flour thickening" is unspecified; a teaspoon or two of flour slaked in cold milk suits this amount of cream. Whisk it in and give it two or three minutes at a simmer to lose the raw taste.
- Slice after boilingThe recipe boils the carrots in halves and slices them thin only afterwards. Keeping that order limits waterlogging and gives the slices more surface for the cream to cling to.
- The second stewingTen to fifteen minutes in cream is longer than tender carrots need. Five is enough to warm through and reduce slightly; beyond that they collapse.
- Garbled endingThe last sentences are transposed in the original printing. The note about boiling carrots with meat is a separate suggestion, and "serve" belongs to the sentence before it.
- YieldThe recipe leaves the carrot quantity open; about a pound and a half suits the amount of sauce described and serves four as a side.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) is associated with Ohio Methodist church circles, and like many community books of its era it credits contributors by initial - here Mrs. C. T. C. - which can leave the same book carrying more than one version of a dish with no attempt to reconcile them. Carrots were cheap and storable in a root cellar through the winter, and were also grown as a field crop for stock feed. The finish offered here, thickening either with flour or with beaten egg yolks, follows the white-sauce logic of the period applied to a root vegetable, and the closing note that carrots may be boiled with meat "like turnips or parsnips" fits the boiled-dinner tradition of plain American cooking of the time.