Home › The Principles of Cookery › Carrot Sauce
Carrot Sauce
Take half a pint of good melted butter. Bring it to a boil, then stir into it two table-spoonfuls of mashed carrots, and a little salt and pepper. Time, ten minutes. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for two pounds of stewed cutlets.
A short Victorian sauce that hinges entirely on one piece of vocabulary: "melted butter" here is not butter melted in a pan.
- "Melted butter" means a white sauceIn British cookery books of this period, melted butter is a flour-thickened butter sauce, roughly 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour cooked together, then whisked with about half a pint of water or light stock until smooth and just thickened. Actual melted butter will not hold two tablespoons of mashed carrot in suspension and will split the moment it boils.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Cassell's is a London book, so read all its pints as imperial.
- The carrotBoil carrots until fully soft, then mash or sieve them; any fibre or lump will read as a flaw in a sauce this smooth. Passing the finished sauce through a fine sieve gives the pale orange, glossy result the recipe is aiming at.
- Ten minutesThe recipe gives only "Time, ten minutes," most likely the simmering after the carrot goes in. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir, or the flour will catch on the base.
- SeasoningCarrot brings sweetness and little else, so the sauce needs more than "a little salt and pepper" to taste of anything. A spoonful of the cutlet cooking liquor, or a squeeze of lemon at the end, sharpens it.
- Cost and yieldFourpence makes this a genuinely cheap sauce. The recipe says half a pint is sufficient for 2 lb of stewed cutlets.
Cassell's ran to a great many small sauces built on the same foundation, and "melted butter" was the most industrious of them: a plain flour-and-butter sauce that took on the character of whatever was stirred in, be it parsley, anchovy, egg, capers or, here, mashed carrot. Carrot sauce belongs to the loose family of purée-thickened vegetable sauces, though the English version is blunter, being poured over stewed mutton or veal cutlets rather than served as a dish in its own right.