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Vegetable Ragout
Take the remains of cold cooked vegetables of various kinds. Cut them into small pieces, sprinkle a little pepper and salt over them, and moisten them with gravy. Put them into a buttered saucepan, and stir briskly over the fire with a wooden spoon till they are quite hot. Serve in a vegetable dish. Time, about ten minutes to heat the vegetables.
A leftovers dish rather than a formal recipe, and it works as well now as it did then, provided the vegetables are reheated properly and the gravy carries the flavour.
- The hinge: reheat hard and fastCold cooked vegetables have already given up their structure once; a long, slow warming turns them to paste. Get the pan properly hot before they go in and keep them moving so they heat through in the stated ten minutes or less.
- What counts as "gravy"In a Victorian kitchen this usually meant the strained juices and stock saved from the previous joint rather than a thickened flour sauce, though thickened gravies were also made. A few spoonfuls of good stock, pan juices or a well-reduced brown sauce does the same job; you want enough to coat, not to stew.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Reckon on about 3 cups of chopped cooked vegetables and 3 to 4 tablespoons of gravy for two people as a side dish; add liquid a spoonful at a time, since a wet ragout collapses.
- Which vegetablesFirm ones behave best: carrots, turnips, parsnips, potatoes, beans, peas, celery. Cabbage and greens reheat sulphurously and are better left out, and cauliflower breaks apart under brisk stirring.
- Cut them evenly"Small pieces" means roughly dice-sized and uniform, so everything comes up to temperature together. Uneven pieces give you scalding potato and cold carrot in the same spoonful.
- The buttered saucepanThe butter chiefly keeps the pieces from sticking, and a wide pan with a heavy base will do the work better than a tall saucepan. The wooden spoon the recipe calls for is gentler on soft vegetables than metal.
- Food safety with leftoversCooked vegetables should have been refrigerated promptly and used within a couple of days. Reheat until steaming right through rather than merely warm.
- Seasoning at the endReduced gravy concentrates its salt, so taste before adding more. A little chopped parsley, a scrape of nutmeg on root vegetables, or a spoonful of mustard lifts what is otherwise a plain dish.
Ragoût comes from the French ragoûter, to revive the appetite, and by the nineteenth century English cookery had borrowed the word for almost any dish of small pieces simmered in a sauce. This entry belongs to the strand of Victorian household writing concerned with what was called "réchauffé" or made-up cookery: the reheating and re-presenting of the previous day's food, a preoccupation in middle-class kitchens where a large joint and its accompaniments had to serve several meals. Victorian household writers commonly treated waste as a domestic failing, and a dish of this kind may well have gone to the table alongside cold meat. The absence of quantities is characteristic of the genre; the cook was expected to work from whatever the larder held rather than from a list.