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Vegetables, Chartreuse Of
Cut three dozen slices of carrot and the same of turnip, make them into designs with a vegetable cutter, and blanch them. Boil two dozen button onions, all of a size; and boil and chop one pound of spinach, one cauliflower, and a dozen asparagus heads. Line a mould with slices of fat bacon, arrange the roots, etc., round the bottom and sides into any pattern that may be fancied, then press the spinach all over them, and fill up with all sorts of chopped cooked vegetables. Set the mould in a pan of hot water, taking care that there is not enough water to boil into the mould. Boil for one hour, and serve with a brown sauce.
A vegetable chartreuse is a moulded terrine built in reverse: the decorative layer goes in first, against the mould, and is only seen when the whole thing is turned out. Everything else follows from that.
- Build the pattern first, and firmlyThe carrot and turnip shapes must be pressed firmly against the bacon-lined mould and then locked in place by the spinach layer, which acts as the glue. If the roots shift while you pack the centre, the turned-out dome will be a smear rather than a design.
- "Blanch them" means part-cookTwo to three minutes in boiling salted water for the carrot and turnip discs, then straight into cold water to set the colour. They finish cooking in the mould; raw ones will still be hard after the hour.
- The bacon liningFat bacon here most likely means unsmoked pork fat, or streaky cut paper-thin, used largely to grease and seal the mould rather than to be eaten. Much modern streaky bacon is smoked and heavily cured and will flavour the whole thing; a thin coat of butter and a disc of baking parchment will do the same structural job if you would rather keep it vegetarian.
- "Boil" in a water bath does not mean boiling"Boil" in a water bath does not mean the mould itself boils -- This is effectively a bain-marie. Keep the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard rolling boil, and keep the level well down: the recipe's own caution is that there must not be enough water to boil into the mould.
- Season as you goThe original assumes seasoning, as many Victorian recipes do. Salt each vegetable in its own cooking water and season the chopped filling before it goes in, since nothing can be adjusted once the mould is closed.
- Drain the spinach hardOne pound of spinach cooks down to very little, and whatever water it keeps will run out of the chartreuse the moment it is unmoulded. Squeeze it in a cloth until it is nearly dry, then chop.
- Turning outRest the mould five to ten minutes out of the water, run a thin knife round the edge, invert onto a warm dish and lift the mould straight up. Any longer and it steams itself loose in a pool of liquid.
- Brown sauceProbably a brown sauce of the espagnole type or a well-reduced meat gravy; pour it round the base rather than over the top so the pattern stays visible. A reduced mushroom or onion gravy serves the same purpose without meat stock.
- YieldThe quantities given fill a good-sized mould and will serve several as a first course; the recipe itself specifies neither mould size nor number of portions.
The name is generally traced to the Carthusian order, whose monks abstained from meat, and a chartreuse was originally understood as a moulded dish of vegetables; by the nineteenth century the grandest versions in French practice hid game or partridge inside the vegetable casing, which was the joke, and the all-vegetable version like this one was the plainer ancestor. Nineteenth-century chefs treated the chartreuse as a set piece judged almost entirely on the neatness of the pattern, which is why Cassell's spends its words on vegetable cutters and designs and barely a line on seasoning. The entry is using it to teach lining a mould and cooking in a water bath, techniques a competent kitchen was expected to apply to fish, forcemeat and jellies alike.