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Leeks, Stewed
Trim off the green part, and also the roots, of the leeks. Throw them into boiling water, boil till tender, and drain. To drain them perfectly they should be turned upside down for some minutes. Serve on toast covered with Dutch sauce (see DUTCH SAUCE) or other white sauce.
A plain Victorian vegetable dish that stands or falls on two things: getting the grit out and getting the water out. The recipe assumes both and mentions neither clearly.
- Wash before you trimLeeks trap soil between their layers, and boiling it in makes the whole dish gritty. Slit each leek lengthwise most of the way down and fan the layers under cold running water before it goes near the pot.
- How much green to removeCassell's says only to trim off the green part, without saying how far. Taking the leek back to the white and palest green suits this cooking method; the dark tops are edible but stay fibrous at this length of cooking, so keep them for stock.
- Boiling timeThe recipe says only to boil till tender. Whole trimmed leeks of ordinary thickness will usually take somewhere around 10-20 minutes depending on thickness. Test at the thick end with the point of a knife; "tender" here means yielding all the way through, not collapsing.
- The draining instruction is the hingeTurning them upside down is not fussiness. Leeks hold water in their concentric layers and will flood the toast and thin the sauce if you skip it. Stand them tip-down in a colander for five minutes, then press gently in a clean cloth.
- Dutch sauceThe recipe points to a separate DUTCH SAUCE entry. In Victorian cookery books Dutch sauce is generally an egg-yolk and butter emulsion sharpened with lemon or vinegar, and period versions are often stabilised with a little flour. Check the book's own entry; any decent hollandaise or a well-seasoned bechamel serves the same purpose.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon two to three trimmed leeks and one slice of toast per person as a first course or light supper dish.
Leeks are among the oldest cultivated alliums in Britain, grown in monastic and cottage gardens from an early date, and they kept a reputation as a poor man's vegetable well into the nineteenth century. Boiling-and-saucing was a default treatment for many vegetables in a late-Victorian kitchen: the vegetable supplies texture, the sauce supplies the interest. Serving on toast, or on a "sippet" of fried bread, gave a watery boiled vegetable a base that would absorb what drained out of it, and similar treatments turn up in period recipes for asparagus, seakale and cardoons. The pairing with a Dutch sauce suggests a dish meant for the dining room rather than the kitchen table, an inexpensive vegetable dressed up with a butter-and-egg emulsion.