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RACINES (en Menu Droit)
Cut some onions into slices, brown them in butter with a pinch of flour. When they are almost done enough, moisten with stock, and stew till quite tender. Have some carrots, parsnips, celery, and turnips ready boiled and cut in slices, and add them to the onions; season with salt, whole pepper, and a few drops of vinegar. Make all very hot, and just before serving mix a little mustard into the sauce.
A late-Victorian way of using up already-boiled root vegetables: a soft onion base slackened with stock, finished sharp with vinegar and mustard. The recipe gives no quantities at all, so treat the proportions below as a working starting point.
- The hinge: add the mustard off the heatThe hinge: add the mustard at the very last moment -- Mustard loses its pungency and turns flat and slightly bitter when boiled. The original says only to mix it in "just before serving"; in practice that means stirring it through once the pan is off the burner and the dish is already hot, then serving straight away.
- Working quantitiesFor four as a side: 2 large onions, 1 oz butter, 1 heaped teaspoon flour, about 1/2 pint (10 fl oz) stock, and roughly 1 1/2 lb mixed cooked carrot, parsnip, celery and turnip. Finish with 1-2 teaspoons vinegar and 1-2 teaspoons made English mustard.
- "Whole pepper"Whole peppercorns, meant to perfume the sauce rather than be eaten. Six to eight black peppercorns is plenty, and they should be fished out before the dish goes to table, or tied in muslin.
- Brown them properlyThe browning of the onions in butter is where the flavour of the dish comes from. Take them to a real deep gold over moderate heat, ten to fifteen minutes; the original adds the pinch of flour along with the butter, so let it cook out with the onions before the stock goes in, or the sauce will taste raw.
- StockThe recipe specifies nothing beyond "stock", which in a household of this kind would most likely have meant whatever was in the stock pot. Any decent unsalted beef or chicken stock works; season at the end, since boiling down concentrates whatever salt is already there.
- Pre-cooked vegetablesThe roots go in already boiled, so they need only to heat through, five minutes at most. Cut them to a uniform thickness, about a quarter inch, or the parsnip and turnip will collapse before the carrot warms.
- "En menu droit"An obscure tag, and the recipe itself gives no gloss. Literally it suggests something small and straight, which points to a serving or cutting direction rather than a cooking one; on that reading it argues for tidy even slices rather than rough chunks.
- ServingThis is an accompaniment, not a main course. It suits boiled or braised beef, salt pork, sausages or cold meat.
Racines is simply French for roots, and the entry belongs to a large family of Victorian dishes built around the vegetables that kept all winter in a cellar: carrot, parsnip, turnip, celery, onion. Cassell's dictionary, compiled for middle-class households with a cook and an eye on waste, is full of these second-day preparations, where vegetables already boiled for one meal are given a sauce and returned to the table as something else. The mustard-and-vinegar finish places it in the same tradition as the sharp sauces served with boiled beef and salt pork, where acidity cuts through fat and plain meat; French kitchen vocabulary on an English root vegetable dish was ordinary in books of this period, since the prestige of the profession and much of its printed terminology were French.