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Some Kitchen Kinks: Carrots
Carrots. The carrot is valuable as a vegetable and as a flavorer. When partially grown and fresh from the ground they have a delicious flavor, and are so tender that they may be cooked without water. As the carrot grows old the flavor grows stronger, and in the majority of varieties the heart grows hard and woody. When the carrot reaches this stage only the outer layers are desirable for food Carrots with White Sauce.
Scrape the carrots lightly; then cut into large dice or slices. Put into a stewpan with salted boiling water, allowing a teaspoonful of salt for a quart of water, and boil until tender. The young carrots will cook in thirty minutes and the old ones in forty-five. Drain, season with a little salt, put them in a vegetable dish, and pour the white sauce over them.
A serviceable vegetable dish, though the boiling times belong to an era of larger, coarser carrots and softer expectations. The main adjustment is time.
- Cut timings roughly in halfModern table carrots, cut into dice or thick slices, are tender in 8-12 minutes in boiling water; whole small ones in 15-20. Thirty to forty-five minutes will give you something closer to a puree than a vegetable, and most of the sweetness will be in the water.
- The salt ratio is worth keepingA teaspoon of salt per quart is a sensible seasoning level for a boiled vegetable and is one of the few precise measurements the entry gives. Salt the water from the start rather than at the end.
- Coring old carrotsThe advice to use only the outer layers is sound for large storage carrots with a pale, fibrous core. Quarter them lengthwise and cut the woody center away before dicing; it never becomes tender no matter how long it boils.
- Cooking without waterYoung carrots fresh from the ground do hold enough moisture to steam in a covered heavy pan with a knob of butter over low heat. This works, but it needs a tight lid and attention, since there is little margin before they scorch.
- The white sauce is assumed, not givenThe white sauce is not given here -- the definite article suggests it was supplied elsewhere in the book. A standard version is roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then a cup of milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and a little pepper or nutmeg. That quantity dresses about a pound of carrots.
- Drain thoroughlyCarrot dice hold surface water in their cut faces, which thins the sauce in the serving dish. Let them steam dry in the colander for a minute, or return them briefly to the hot dry pan.
- YieldA pound of carrots with a cup of sauce serves four as a side dish.
Carrots came to American kitchens as a field crop as much as a garden one, grown heavily for stock feed, and nineteenth-century cookbooks are often said to treat them with a faint air of duty rather than pleasure. The distinction this entry draws between young carrots and old is a real one from the days before year-round supply: summer carrots were pulled small and sweet, while the winter supply came from clamps and root cellars, where months of storage affected texture and moisture; the hard, woody heart, as the recipe itself has it, comes with age and variety rather than with keeping. The white sauce is the standard nineteenth-century solution for almost any boiled vegetable, descended from the French sauce blanche and b\échamel and thoroughly domesticated in English and American household manuals by 1900. "Kitchen kinks" was a period phrase for small tricks and shortcuts, which explains the entry's shape: a paragraph of practical judgment about the ingredient, with the recipe attached almost as an afterthought.