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Carrots, Stewed
Wash and slice some large carrots, and simmer them till they are nearly tender in as much weak broth as will cover them, then add a cupful of milk, and thicken the sauce with flour and butter. Season it with pepper and salt. Keep stirring the contents of the saucepan to prevent them burning. Put the carrots into a hot vegetable dish, and pour the gravy over them. Time, one hour and a half. Sufficient, six large carrots for five persons.
A straightforward vegetable braise that needs little translation, though the timing belongs to an era of much older, coarser carrots.
- TimingAn hour and a half will reduce modern supermarket carrots to mush. Sliced carrots simmer to tender in 15-20 minutes; the long time in the original assumes large, mature winter roots with a woody core.
- Weak brothThis means a thin, unsalted or lightly salted stock — the second-run liquid from bones, or the cooking water from another dish. Diluting a good stock with an equal part water gives the same effect, and keeps the sauce from tasting concentrated once it reduces.
- "A cupful of milk"A cup in an English book of this date is not a standard measure; read it loosely, somewhere in the region of 7-10 fl oz. Add it only once the carrots are nearly done and keep the heat below a boil, or the milk will catch on the bottom — which is what the instruction to keep stirring guards against.
- Thickening with flour and butterKnead equal weights of soft butter and flour into a paste (beurre manié) — about 1 tbsp of each for this quantity — and whisk it into the simmering liquid in small pieces. Give it two or three minutes of gentle cooking to lose the raw flour taste.
- SlicingCut the rounds to an even thickness, about 1/4 inch. Uneven slices will give you collapsed edges and firm centres in the same pan, and the sauce will thin as the broken pieces release water.
- SeasoningPepper and salt only, in the original. Carrots and a milk-thickened sauce take well to a grating of nutmeg or a spoon of chopped parsley stirred in at the end, both period-appropriate additions in English cookery of this date.
- YieldSix large carrots for five is a smaller side-dish portion than we would serve now. As one of two vegetables alongside a roast, expect it to serve three or four.
Cassell's places this among its plainest vegetable entries, and the method — simmer in broth, finish with milk and a butter-and-flour thickening — is the standard late-Victorian treatment for almost any root vegetable, applied equally to turnips and parsnips. The recipe assumes a household with stockpot liquid always to hand, which is why it can call for "weak broth" without further explanation. The very long stated time is a useful record of the raw material rather than a mistake. The large, late-season keepers of the period were often stored through winter in sand or clamps, and they genuinely did need long cooking to soften a fibrous core. The slender, sweet, quick-cooking carrot most cooks buy now, whose ancestry is generally traced in part to nineteenth-century French types, rewrites the timing on almost every carrot recipe in books of this vintage.