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VEGETABLES, MIXED (second cooking)
Take various kinds of cold cooked vegetables, cut them small, and mix them together. For a quart of vegetables chop small four moderate-sized onions. Fry them in butter or fat till they begin to turn yellow, then stir the vegetables into them, and keep stirring till they are quite hot. Season the whole rather highly with white pepper, and add a little salt. When they are half done, put with them four sliced tomatoes, a spoonful or two of good gravy, and a little lemon-juice or chilli vinegar. Serve very hot. Time, about twenty minutes.
A Victorian way with leftovers: cold boiled vegetables refried with onion, tomato and a sharp finish. The method is sound, and the only real risk is turning it to mush.
- QuantitiesA quart of chopped cooked vegetables is roughly 4 cups, or about 1 1/2 lb once diced. Four onions to that volume is a lot by modern taste; two medium onions give plenty of sweetness without swamping the rest.
- Cut everything the same sizeThe vegetables are already cooked, so nothing will soften further in any useful way. Dice to a uniform 1/2 inch or the mixture reheats unevenly and the softer items collapse.
- Stir less than the recipe saysConstant stirring of pre-cooked potato, carrot and turnip breaks them down. Spread them in a wide pan, leave them to catch and colour for a minute or two at a time, then turn them with a spatula.
- Chilli vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: vinegar steeped with dried chillies. A teaspoon of cider vinegar with a pinch of cayenne, or a dash of any hot pepper sauce, stands in for it.
- "Good gravy"Meat gravy or a spoonful of well-reduced stock, used to bind rather than to wet. A tablespoon or two is enough; more and the dish steams instead of frying.
- TomatoesFour sliced tomatoes will release a good deal of liquid. Seed them first, or use halved cherry tomatoes. The recipe adds them when the vegetables are half done; leaving them later still will keep them from breaking down.
- White pepperOften preferred in this period for dishes where dark specks were thought unsightly, though the reason is not given here. Its flavour is mustier and less aromatic than black. The recipe gives no quantity: 'rather highly' means season more assertively than you would a freshly boiled vegetable.
- YieldServes four as a side dish, or two as a supper with a fried egg on top.
Second cooking, or rechauffe, was a whole category in Victorian cookery books rather than an afterthought. A household that boiled a joint and a heap of root vegetables on Sunday needed a repertoire for Monday, and reheating without the tell-tale flatness that gave leftovers their bad name was a skill in its own right. The tricks here are the standard ones: fried onion for depth, an acid note from lemon or chilli vinegar to lift flavours dulled by a night in the larder, and heavy seasoning because boiled vegetables give up much of theirs to the water. Chilli vinegar itself belongs to a long English enthusiasm for bottled sharpeners, alongside Worcestershire sauce and the older mushroom ketchup, all of them ways of putting a savoury edge back into plain cooking.