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Carrots, Fried
Wash and partly boil the carrots whole; cut them into thin slices, dip them in egg and finely-grated bread-crumbs, and fry in hot butter or lard. Serve them piled high on a dish. Cold carrots may be warmed up this way. Time to fry, ten minutes. Sufficient, six carrots for five persons.
A straightforward Victorian way of using up boiled carrots, and it still works. The only real trap is the parboiling stage.
- "Partly boil"The carrots should be tender at the edges but still firm at the centre — roughly 8-10 minutes in salted boiling water for medium carrots, less for slim ones. Fully soft carrots will collapse when sliced and refuse to hold a crumb coat.
- Cool before coatingEgg will scramble on a hot carrot slice and the crumbs will slide off. Spread the slices out and let them cool to room temperature, or use yesterday's carrots as the recipe suggests.
- Slice thickness"Thin slices" is not defined in the original; something around 1/4 inch works well. Cut much thinner and the crumb coat outweighs the vegetable.
- CrumbsFinely-grated bread-crumbs are dried crumbs made from stale bread, not the soft fresh kind and not panko. Dried crumbs brown more evenly over a ten-minute fry; fresh ones are likelier to catch.
- Fat and heatButter alone will brown too fast for a ten-minute fry — use clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, at a steady medium heat in a shallow pan. Lard, as given, tolerates the heat better than whole butter.
- TimingTen minutes total is for shallow-frying in a modest amount of fat, turning once. In deeper fat at 350F they will be done in three or four minutes, since the carrots are already cooked and only the coating needs colour.
- Yield and servingSix carrots for five people makes this a side dish, not a main. Drain on paper, salt while hot, and pile them up as directed — they lose their crispness fast, so serve straight away.
Egging and crumbing was a general Victorian technique applied almost indiscriminately to cooked vegetables, cold meat, croquettes and fish, and the book expects the reader to recognise it as a method rather than a novelty. The closing line — "cold carrots may be warmed up this way" — is the real point of the entry. In a period kitchen cooking for a household, yesterday's boiled vegetables were a standing problem, and a crumb coat and a hot pan turned leftovers into something that could respectably be sent to table. Carrots themselves were cheap and stored well in sand through the winter.