Home › Vegetables › Savory Carrots
Savory Carrots
Scrape, then cut new carrots into straws. Cook tender in salted water and drain dry. Season with salt, pepper and a little onion juice and return to the kettle with a generous piece of butter and shake till hot and glazed. Pile on a dish in pyramid form, add a cup of fresh green peas well seasoned and a sprinkling of chopped parsley.-Anne Warner.
Maitre d'Hotel Potatoes Wash, pare and cut potatoes into balls, using a French vegetable cutter, making two cups. Soak fifteen minutes in cold water and cook in boiling salted water until soft. Drain and add the sauce.
For this, cream three tablespoons of butter, add one teaspoon of lemon juice, one-half teaspoon of salt, one-eighth teaspoon of pepper and one-half tablespoon of finely chopped parsley. Stella A. Downing.
Two side dishes run together on one page: julienned carrots finished in butter with peas, and potato balls dressed in maître d'hôtel butter. Both are straightforward once a few period terms are translated.
- "Kettle" means the saucepanIn American cookbooks of this era a kettle is any deep cooking pot, not a tea kettle. Return the drained carrots to the same pan you boiled them in.
- Onion juiceStandard early-20th-century seasoning: grate half a small onion and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or grate on a microplane and use the liquid. Half a teaspoon is generous for a pound of carrots. Onion powder is not a substitute in texture or flavour, though it will do at a pinch.
- Cutting the carrotsStraws means julienne, roughly 1/8 inch square and two to three inches long. New carrots this size cook through in four to six minutes in boiling salted water; older supermarket carrots will want closer to eight and should be cored if woody.
- Drain dryThe instruction matters more than it looks. Wet carrots will not glaze; let them steam off in the colander for a minute, then shake them in the butter over moderate heat until the surface goes glossy.
- The peas are cooked separatelyThe recipe assumes you have shelled peas already cooked and seasoned. Frozen peas, boiled two minutes and tossed with butter and salt, serve the same purpose.
- French vegetable cutterA parisienne scoop or melon baller. Two cups of balls will take at least a couple of pounds of large potatoes, depending on the size of the scoop, with a great deal of trim left over for soup or mash. Cooking time is eight to twelve minutes depending on the size of the scoop.
- The soakFifteen minutes in cold water rinses off surface starch so the balls stay separate and hold their shape. It is worth doing.
- Maitre d'hotel butterThe sauce is a compound butter, not a cooked sauce: creamed butter, lemon, salt, pepper, parsley, tossed with the hot drained potatoes so it melts on contact. Do not heat it in a pan or the lemon and butter will separate.
- YieldThe potatoes, at two cups of balls, will stretch to about four as a side; the carrot recipe gives no quantity, so scale to suit.
Both entries are contributor recipes, signed by name in the way turn-of-the-century American cookery collections gathered them from readers and staff writers. The pairing of buttered carrots with green peas was a fixture of the American spring table, when new carrots and fresh-shelled peas arrived together, and the instruction to pile the carrots in a pyramid reflects a period expectation that vegetables be composed on the platter rather than simply spooned out. Maitre d'hotel butter is older and French in origin, a plain compound butter of parsley and lemon long associated with professional kitchen practice, where it served as a dressing for grilled meat and boiled potatoes alike; its appearance here, along with the parisienne scoop, suggests how far restaurant technique had filtered into the ambitious American home kitchen by this date.