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Creamed Carrots
Scrape the carrots and cut in slices one-fourth of an inch thick. Let them lie in cold water an hour before cooking.
Boil till tender in salted water, drain and pour over them a well seasoned white sauce.
A plain nineteenth-century vegetable dish that assumes you already know how to make a white sauce. The gaps are all in quantities and timing.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. About 1 1/2 lb carrots and roughly a cup of white sauce serves four as a side.
- The hour in cold waterPeriod cookbooks often direct vegetables to be laid in cold water before cooking, though the reason is rarely given; freshening limp storage roots is one likely purpose. It does little for modern bunched or bagged carrots. Skip it if the carrots are fresh; it costs nothing but time.
- ScrapingScraping with the back of a knife suits thin-skinned young carrots. Larger supermarket carrots are easier peeled.
- Boiling timeQuarter-inch slices in salted water are tender in 6 to 10 minutes. Longer boiling times of twenty minutes or more are not unusual in cookbooks of the era, and leave carrots waterlogged and dull.
- Drain thoroughlyLet the carrots steam dry in the colander for a minute before saucing. Residual water thins the sauce and it slides off.
- The white sauceA medium white sauce: 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 1 cup milk, the roux cooked a couple of minutes before the milk goes in. The recipe does not say what 'well seasoned' covers; salt and white pepper are the usual minimum, and nutmeg is a frequent addition in sauces of this kind.
- FinishingFold the carrots into the sauce in the pan rather than pouring sauce over them in the dish, and warm through briefly so the two combine.
Creamed vegetables were a fixture of American middle-class cooking from the late nineteenth century onward, and cookbook writers of the era treated white sauce as a foundation to be learned once and applied to almost anything: onions, celery, potatoes, peas, dried beef, hard-boiled eggs. Carrots were a cheap winter keeper, stored in sand or a root cellar, and by spring they could be woody. The dish belongs to a school of household cookery aimed at making plain, abundant, storable food palatable on a family table.