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Boiled Carrots
Wash and prepare the carrots. If they are very large they should be halved and sliced. Throw them into plenty of boiling water with salt in it, keep them boiling, and when a fork can be easily pushed into them they are ready. They may be boiled in the same saucepan with beef, and a few should be placed round the dish and the rest sent to table in a tureen. Melted butter generally accompanies them. Many persons are fond of cold carrots with cold beef. They may be easily warmed up by covering them closely and putting the dish in which they are placed into boiling water. Time: young carrots, half an hour; fully-grown, from one and a half to two hours.
A plain boiled vegetable from the era when carrots were cooked until they surrendered. The method needs almost nothing changed except the clock.
- The timing is the one thing to ignoreNinety minutes to two hours will reduce even a woody main-crop carrot to sweet mush. Sliced carrots are tender in 8-12 minutes, thick batons or halved whole carrots in 15-25. Test with a fork as the recipe says, but start testing early.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn nineteenth-century English cookery books melted butter means a thin flour-and-butter sauce, not simply butter run in a pan. If you want the period effect, make a light white roux loosened with the carrot water; if you want the modern one, plain butter and salt is better with carrots anyway.
- Plenty of salted waterCarrots are not damaged by generous salting and the water carries flavour out of them, so salt it properly. Cook uncovered at a steady boil rather than a hard rolling one, which knocks slices apart.
- Boiling with the beefThis assumes a large joint simmered in water, the old boiled-beef dinner. If you are roasting instead, cook the carrots separately and finish them with a spoonful of the pan juices.
- A tureenA covered serving bowl. Any lidded dish works, and the lid matters more than the shape: sliced carrots go cold quickly.
- Reheating in a bain-marieThe instruction to set the covered dish in boiling water is a gentle water bath, and it is still the best way to warm cooked carrots without turning them to purée. Five to ten minutes is enough.
- Scraping versus peeling"Prepare" is left unexplained; in period practice young carrots were commonly scraped and older ones pared. Young carrots need only a scrub; older ones peel more cleanly with a swivel peeler, and the top nearest the crown can be bitter and is worth trimming.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon about 1 1/2 lb of carrots for four people as a side dish, a little more if they are going round a boiled joint as garnish.
Boiled carrots with boiled beef is one of the fixed pairings of Victorian and Edwardian English cooking, and the recipe's aside that "many persons are fond of cold carrots with cold beef" places it squarely in a household that expected a large joint to reappear at a second and third meal. Carrots were among the cheapest and longest-keeping winter vegetables, stored in sand or clamped in earth, which is why the recipe distinguishes so sharply between young summer carrots and fully-grown roots that had been out of the ground for months. The long times reflect both those tough stored roots and a general period preference for vegetables cooked well past what we would now call done; orange carrots of the sort familiar today are generally traced to Dutch selection work from the seventeenth century onward, and by the time this book was compiled they were the ordinary market carrot.