Home › The Principles of Cookery › Carrots, Red Puree Of
Carrots, Red Puree Of
Wash and scrape some fine large carrots. Cut the red part off in thin slices, and boil these for about a quarter of an hour. Take them out, drain, and put them into a saucepan with an onion stuck with two cloves, a little salt and pepper, a small piece of butter, and just enough stock to cover them. Let them boil gently till tender, then pass them through a coarse sieve. Place the pulp in a stewpan with a quarter of a pound of butter, a little grated nutmeg, a small piece' of sugar, and a cupful of stock, and stir until it is thick. The puree may be served with stewed mutton cutlets round it. Time, two hours and a half. Sufficient, eight large carrots for two pounds of cutlets.
A classic French-style vegetable purée written for carrots that were coarser than ours. The technique is sound; the proportions and the timing both need reading in period context.
- The "red part"Older carrot varieties had a distinct pale core that stayed tougher and less sweet than the outer flesh, and period recipes commonly direct the cook to pare away only that outer layer. Modern varieties are far more uniform, so the whole root can be sliced.
- Onion stuck with clovesThis is an oignon clouté, used to perfume the stock; the recipe does not say so, but it would be lifted out before the carrots are sieved. Push the cloves in firmly so they do not detach in the pan.
- The sievePassing hot pulp through a coarse hair or wire sieve with a wooden spoon was the only route to smoothness. A food mill on the coarse plate gives the same texture; a blender gives a slicker, more modern result that loses some of the character.
- A quarter of a pound of butterFour ounces of butter to eight carrots is a Victorian richness, and the purée is meant as a sauce-like garnish rather than a side vegetable. Half that quantity still binds and glosses the pulp.
- "A small piece of sugar"Loaf sugar was sold in lumps and broken off as needed, so the amount is imprecise; a small lump is on the order of a teaspoon. Taste first, since modern carrots are generally sweeter than the field carrots this was written for.
- The stated timeTwo and a half hours most likely covers the whole operation, mutton included, rather than the purée alone. The recipe gives a quarter of an hour for the first boiling and then only 'till tender'; the final thickening over heat takes a few minutes of steady stirring.
- Stirring until thickThis is the step that matters. The purée must lose its watery stock over direct heat so it holds a shape on the plate, and it will catch and scorch the moment you stop moving the spoon.
- YieldEight large carrots reduce to enough purée to ring a platter of two pounds of cutlets, which is all the book specifies; it gives no number of diners.
Purées of root vegetables belong to the French repertoire that English cookery books absorbed steadily through the nineteenth century, and Cassell's includes this one under a plain alphabetical, dictionary-style heading. The instruction to use only the outer flesh is the tell of its age: until breeding work of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced the uniformly orange, coreless roots now standard, a carrot was two vegetables in one, a sweet red exterior around a starchy pale heart. Serving the purée as a bed or border for mutton cutlets reflects one common pattern of the period, in which a vegetable preparation might carry and season the meat, though vegetables were also routinely served beside it in their own dishes.