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CARROTS (a la Reine)
Choose some fine large carrots and cut them into pieces about three inches long; make them flat at one end and narrow and round at the other, so as to give them the form of cones. Boil them until nearly tender, then place them upright in a saucepan with some good gravy, leaving about an inch of the tops uncovered to prevent their being broken. Boil them until they are sufficiently cooked, take them out, and arrange them in a dish. Thicken the gravy with a little brown thickening, add a pinch of salt and a small piece of sugar to it, and pour it over them. Time, one hour and a half.
A Victorian garnish vegetable dressed as a dish in its own right: carrots turned into cones, braised upright in brown gravy, and glazed with the reduced sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the timing and one lost ingredient need translating.
- Ignore the ninety minutesTreat the ninety minutes with caution -- in books of this kind the stated "time" often covers the whole operation. Large carrots cut to three-inch cones will usually be tender well inside that, perhaps 20 to 40 minutes of actual cooking split between the initial boil and the braise. Cooked to the full hour and a half they risk collapsing and will not stand up in the dish, which defeats the shaping.
- "Brown thickening"A standing preparation in Victorian kitchens: flour cooked in butter or clarified dripping until nut-brown, kept in a jar and whisked into sauces as needed. A brown roux made fresh, or a knob of beurre manié browned briefly, does the same work. Allow about a tablespoon of flour to a cup of gravy.
- "Good gravy"In Victorian usage this normally means a made brown gravy or meat stock (veal or beef bones, browned vegetables, reduced) rather than the drippings from a roast. A well-reduced beef stock stands in. Vegetable stock works, though the dish loses the meaty depth it was built around.
- Standing them uprightThe instruction to leave an inch of the tops clear is the hinge; the recipe's stated reason is to prevent the cones being broken, and it lets them be lifted out whole. Use a narrow, deep pan so they wedge against each other and cannot fall over.
- Turning the conesWide, straight carrots are wanted, not tapered supermarket bunches. A small knife pared toward the narrow end gives the shape faster than a peeler. Save the trimmings for the stock or a soup; there will be a good deal of waste.
- The sugar"a small piece" means a lump, roughly a teaspoon, though Victorian lumps varied in size. With a reduced brown gravy it gives the glazed finish the dish is after; taste before adding more, as modern table carrots may well be sweeter than those the recipe assumed.
- YieldFigure two or three cones a person. Two pounds of large carrots serves four as a side.
À la reine, "in the queen's style," was one of the loosest tags in nineteenth-century cookery, attached to everything from chicken purées to soups to this dressed-up root vegetable. It generally signalled refinement: something trimmed, sieved, whitened or otherwise given more labour than the ingredient strictly deserved. Here the labour is the knife work, and it belongs to the tradition of shaped or "turned" vegetable cutting that French professional kitchens developed and English household books passed on to cooks working with far less staff. That such a recipe sits in a general dictionary of cookery says something about late-Victorian ambition in the middle-class kitchen: the carrot, cheap and widely available, could be made to look as though it had come from a grand table.