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CARROTS (a la Portugaise)
Clean one pound of young carrots. Warm three table-spoonfuls of salad oil in a stewpan, notch and place a clove of garlic in it with a little salt, and when it boils add the carrots. Fry them for about ten or fifteen minutes, shaking the pan from time to time to prevent burning. Drain off the oil. Take half a pint of brown vegetable sauce and add the pulp of four large tomatoes. Strain and add it to the carrots. Draw the pan to the side of the fire, cover tightly, and let its contents simmer until cooked. Then dish. Let the sauce boil up sharply, and pour it over and around the carrots. Serve with croutons fried in oil. Probable cost, 1s.
A straightforward oil-braised carrot dish; the only real obstacles are the vessel, the sauce, and the fact that whole young carrots take far longer than the fry time suggests.
- Brown vegetable sauceCassell's brown vegetable sauce is a meatless brown sauce, browned vegetables and flour cooked out and strained. Half a pint here is an imperial half-pint, about 10 fl oz; a well-reduced vegetable stock thickened with a brown roux gives the same body, and a jarred gravy will read too sweet and salty against the tomato.
- Salad oilThis means olive oil, which is what the Portuguese attribution implies. Three tablespoons is enough to shallow-fry a pound of carrots if the pan is narrow.
- The garlic clove"Notch" means to score it so it releases flavour while staying in one piece for easy removal. The oil should be warm rather than smoking when the garlic goes in, or it turns bitter before the carrots are added.
- Frying timeTen to fifteen minutes browns the outsides but will not cook whole young carrots through. The real cooking happens in the covered simmer; allow 20 to 30 minutes there, depending on thickness, and test with a knife tip.
- "Draw the pan to the side of the fire"On a range this is the cooler edge of the hob. Translate to low heat, barely bubbling, lid on.
- Tomato pulpFour large tomatoes, peeled and seeded, gives a cup and a half or more of pulp. Out of season, use tinned tomatoes crushed and drained of their thinnest liquid.
- StrainingThe sauce is strained before it meets the carrots, so seeds and skin do not matter much; if you want the texture rustic, skip the sieve and accept a rougher finish.
- FinishingBoiling the sauce "up sharply" after the carrots come out is a reduction step, not a formality. Two or three minutes at a hard boil concentrates it enough to coat.
- YieldA pound of carrots serves three or four as a side dish. Fry the croutons in the same oil the carrots came out of.
Cassell's filed vegetable dishes under national tags that signalled a style rather than a specific regional origin: "a la Portugaise" in this period generally means tomato, garlic and olive oil. The convention comes out of French professional kitchen nomenclature, where portugaise was shorthand for a tomato garnish, and it travelled into English household books as a label rather than a claim of provenance. Here the carrots are fried in oil rather than boiled and buttered, and the accompanying sauce is explicitly a vegetable one. The "probable cost, 1s." is a feature of Cassell's throughout, meant to let a housekeeper budget a menu at a glance.