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Carrot Pie
This is a favourite dish with vegetarians. Wash and slice the carrots, and parboil them. Put them in a dish edged with a light crust. Add pepper and salt, and pour a little water over them. Cover them with crust, and bake the pie in a moderate oven. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost of carrots, 6d. or 8d. per bunch. Sufficient, a moderate-sized pie for six persons.
A plain vegetable pie of the kind Victorian cookery books offered as a meatless main course. The instructions are sparse, and a few gaps are worth filling before you commit to it.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" here means 350-375F (180-190C). Forty-five minutes at that heat will set and brown the crust; the filling only needs heating through, since the carrots are already parboiled.
- Parboil properlyThis is the hinge of the recipe. Carrots sliced thin and boiled 5-8 minutes until just yielding will finish tender in the pie; raw or barely blanched carrots stay crunchy under a lid of pastry, because there is not enough liquid to steam them.
- "A light crust"Most likely a plain shortcrust or a light suet crust rather than puff pastry, though the recipe does not say. A rimmed dish "edged with a light crust" is the standard deep pie-dish method: a strip of pastry pressed round the wet rim so the lid has something to seal against.
- A little water is very littleTwo or three tablespoons is enough with parboiled carrots, which release their own moisture. More and the underside of the lid goes soggy and the filling turns to thin broth.
- Season beyond pepper and saltCarrots baked with water alone are sweet and flat. A knob of butter, a chopped onion softened first, a little grated nutmeg or thyme, or a spoonful of stock or cream will give the filling something to hold onto. None of this is in the original, but the original is a template.
- Vent the lidCut a steam hole or two before baking. A sealed lid over wet vegetables lifts and splits.
- Yield and servingThe book's "six persons" is generous by modern standards; as a main course it will serve three or four, and it wants something sharp alongside - pickles, a mustard sauce, or a green salad.
- On the costing"6d. or 8d. per bunch" is sixpence or eightpence in pre-decimal currency and tells you only that carrots were among the cheapest things in the market.
Cassell's note that this "is a favourite dish with vegetarians" places it precisely: organised vegetarianism was a recognisable British movement by the second half of the nineteenth century, with the Vegetarian Society founded in 1847 at Ramsgate and soon centred on Manchester, and general household dictionaries began quietly carrying a handful of meatless dishes for readers who wanted them. Encasing cheap root vegetables in pastry was much older than any movement, though - a crust turned a bowl of boiled carrots into something that could be carried to table as a course in its own right, and cooks had long used the sweetness of carrots in dishes such as carrot puddings and sweet tarts. The terse costing line at the end is characteristic of the book, which was written for households budgeting to the penny.