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CARROTS (a la Flamande)
Take a bunch of young carrots, which alone are suitable, wash them well, cut off the heads and points, and place them in boiling water for five minutes. Take them out, drain, rub off the skin with a coarse cloth, cut them into very thin slices, and put them into a saucepan with a cupful of water, a little salt and pepper, and a piece of butter the size of a small egg. Cover them closely, and simmer gently for twenty minutes, shaking the pan occasionally in order that they may be equally cooked. Mix the yolks of two eggs with a cupful of cream, and a dessert-spoonful of finely-chopped parsley. Draw the pan from the fire for a couple of minutes, taking off the cover, put a table-spoonful or two of the liquid with the eggs and cream, then pour the whole gradually into the saucepan. Stir the sauce until it thickens, and serve the carrots with the sauce poured over them. Time to stew the carrots, half an hour. Probable cost, 8d. per bunch. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Flemish-style buttered carrot dish finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Everything hangs on the last step: once the yolks go in, the sauce must thicken without boiling.
- Never let the sauce boilThe pan is drawn off the fire and uncovered for a reason. Yolks set at around 160-180F; if the liquid returns to a simmer after they are added, the sauce curdles into scrambled egg. Tempering with a spoonful or two of the hot cooking liquid first, as directed, is the whole insurance policy.
- "A piece of butter the size of a small egg"Roughly 1 1/2 to 2 oz, or 3 to 4 tablespoons. With only a cupful of water, this is effectively a butter-braise rather than boiled carrots.
- CupfulVictorian cups were not standardised, and in a British book the word could mean anything from 8 fl oz to a half-pint. Read it as about 8 fl oz for both the water and the cream. Less water gives a more concentrated glaze, which is no loss here.
- The five-minute blanchIts main job is to loosen the skins so they rub off with a cloth, a real convenience with young carrots whose skin is too thin to peel cleanly. A vegetable peeler or a good scrub does much the same job, though skipping the blanch means the carrots go into the pan entirely raw.
- Conflicting timesThe method says twenty minutes' simmering, the note at the end says half an hour. Very thin slices of young carrot will be tender in fifteen to twenty; go by feel and stop while they still hold their shape.
- CreamUse heavy or double cream. Modern half-and-half or single cream, combined with two yolks and no flour, gives a thinner and more fragile sauce.
- Yield and servingFour to five as a side dish. Serve at once in a warmed dish; the sauce stiffens and separates if held over heat.
À la flamande — in the Flemish manner — attached itself in nineteenth-century cookery to vegetables stewed in butter and finished with a liaison of egg yolks and cream, a treatment akin to that given to the buttered root vegetables of Belgian and northern French cooking. Cassell's was a household dictionary rather than a chef's manual, and this entry is characteristic of how it worked: a French kitchen formula reduced to plain English, with the cost per bunch and the number of persons served printed at the end so a mistress could price the dish before ordering it. The insistence that only young carrots will do reflects a market that sold them by the bunch with tops on, in season, rather than as year-round storage roots; older carrots, one presumes, went instead to soup, to braises, or to the stockpot, where long cooking could soften a woody core.