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Carrots, Boiled
Wash and prepare the carrots. If they are very large they should be halved and sliced. Throw them into plenty of boiling water with salt in it, keep them boiling, and when a fork can be easily pushed into them they are ready. They may be boiled in the same saucepan with beef, and a few should be placed round the dish and the rest sent to table in a tureen. Melted butter generally accompanies them. Many persons are fond of cold carrots with cold beef. They may be easily warmed up by covering them closely and putting the dish in which they are placed into boiling water. Time, young carrots, half an hour; fully-grown, from one and a half to two hours. Sufficient, four large carrots for six persons.
A plain boiling method that needs one substantial correction: the timings belong to a period of far older, coarser carrots than anything sold today.
- The times are far too longModern carrots, even large ones, are tender in 15-25 minutes cut into pieces, and small whole ones in about 10-15. The book's hour and a half to two hours suits older, coarser roots with a tough core; applied to supermarket stock it produces mush.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce"Melted butter" is usually a sauce -- In Victorian cookery books melted butter commonly means the flour-thickened butter sauce, roughly a roux with water or stock beaten smooth, rather than simply butter run in a pan. Either reading works here; the recipe does not specify.
- Cut for even cookingHalving and slicing large carrots is not just for speed. A whole thick carrot cooks from the outside in and the outer layer collapses before the core softens, so batons or thick coins of matched size are the practical choice.
- Boiling with the beefCooking the carrots in the beef pot means they take up salt and fat from the liquid. If the beef needs two or three hours, add the carrots for the last half hour rather than at the start.
- Salt the water generouslySalt the water -- "Plenty of boiling water with salt in it" means seasoned water, not a token pinch. Carrots boiled in unsalted water taste washed out no matter how much butter follows.
- The reheating trickSetting the covered dish of cold carrots into boiling water is a water bath, and it still works. It warms them through without a second boil, which would break them down further.
- YieldFour large carrots for six people is a modest side portion by current standards; increase it if carrots are the only vegetable.
Boiled carrots with boiled beef is one of the fixed pairings of the nineteenth-century English table, and this recipe treats it as too obvious to argue for: the roots go into the beef pot, some are arranged around the meat as garnish, the rest travel separately in a tureen. A covered vessel of this kind kept vegetables hot on their way to the table. The note that many people like cold carrots with cold beef points at the other half of the Victorian meat economy, in which a large joint was expected to reappear cold the following day, and the vegetables with it. Carrots were a cheap, storable winter root, commonly cellared in sand, which may be why the recipe allows for specimens needing two hours in the pot.