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CARROTS (a la Creme)
Take some very small carrots, clean and put them into boiling water with one table-spoonful of salt, and boil fast till tender; then drain and return them to the stewpan for a minute, with two table-spoonfuls of cream, a lump of sugar, an ounce of butter, and a sprinkling of pepper. Serve at once. Probable cost, 8d.
A short, clean recipe that needs almost nothing changed — only a few quantities and one point about the carrots themselves.
- Quantity and yieldThe original gives no weights. About 1 lb (450 g) of small carrots serves four as a side, and takes the cream, sugar and butter given without adjustment.
- "Very small carrots"This means genuine young carrots, thumb-thick, cooked whole with perhaps an inch of stem left. Supermarket "baby carrots" are usually lathe-cut mature roots and will taste woodier; halved or quartered slim regular carrots are a better substitute.
- A lump of sugarLumps were nipped from a sugar loaf and varied in size; a modern sugar cube, about a level teaspoon, is a fair working equivalent. One teaspoon is plenty — the point is to lift the carrots' own sweetness, not to candy them.
- Two tablespoonfuls of creamUse heavy or double cream. Lighter cream is more likely to thin out or split over direct heat in the pan, which the brief final minute is meant to avoid.
- The hinge: drain them dryWet carrots dilute the cream and it never clings. Drain well, let the pan steam them dry for a few seconds over the heat, then add cream, butter and sugar and toss just until glossy.
- Boil fast, then stopSmall carrots take roughly 8–12 minutes in the salted water depending on thickness; test with a knife tip rather than the clock. The minute in the stewpan is for coating only, not further cooking.
- Cost note"Probable cost, 8d." is eightpence in pre-decimal currency, the sort of figure Cassell's gave so a housekeeper could budget a menu. It has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
Cooking a vegetable in stock or water and then finishing it with cream, butter and a pinch of sugar is the French re, and its appearance in an English dictionary of cookery reflects how thoroughly French kitchen vocabulary had entered middle-class British households by the late nineteenth century. Cassell's ran hundreds of such short entries alphabetically, often with a "probable cost" so the reader could price a dish before committing to it — a reminder that these books were as much household accounting manuals as cookbooks. Small early carrots were a seasonal luxury of late spring and summer before year-round supply, which is why the recipe insists on "very small" ones and adds so little to them; a young carrot needed no disguising.