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Carrots à La Pompadour
2 cupfuls cooked sliced 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 carrots ozs.) flour 2 cupfuls cooked sliced po- 1/2 pint (I cup) cream 1/2 pint (I cup) milk Salt and pepper 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 2 tablespoonfuls grated cheese tatoes ozs.) butter A few browned bread crumbs Butter a fireproof dish, then put in the carrots and then the potatoes on the top. Blend the butter and flour together in a saucepan over the fire, add gradually the milk, cream, cheese, salt and pepper, and stir till it boils.
Pour over the potatoes, sprinkle the browned bread crumbs on the top. Bake in a hot oven for ten minutes.
A gratin of pre-cooked carrots and potatoes under a cheese-enriched white sauce. The whole point is that both vegetables go in already tender, since ten minutes in the oven only browns the top.
- What you actually need2 cups cooked sliced carrots, 2 cups cooked sliced potatoes, 2 heaping tablespoons (2 oz) butter, 2 heaping tablespoons (2 oz) flour, 1 cup milk, 1 cup cream, 2 tablespoons grated cheese, salt and pepper, and a few browned breadcrumbs.
- A hot ovenRead that as 425-450F. At ten minutes the dish is only heating through and colouring the crumbs, so it needs the heat high; if your sauce and vegetables have cooled, give it 20 minutes at 400F instead and finish under the broiler.
- "Fireproof dish"Flameproof or ovenproof earthenware or glass; a modern gratin dish or shallow 1.5-quart baker will do.
- Half a pintThe book is using the pint of 16 fluid ounces, and helpfully glosses it: half a pint is one cup.
- The sauceCook the butter and flour together a minute or two before adding liquid, and add it gradually with the pan off the fiercest heat. Bring it to a boil to cook out the flour, but stir the cheese in at the end rather than boiling it hard, which makes it stringy.
- The cheeseTwo tablespoons is a seasoning, not a cheese sauce. A dry aged cheese — Parmesan or a firm Cheddar — gives more return than a mild one at that quantity.
- Browned crumbsThese are dry crumbs already toasted in butter or in the oven; they are not raw fresh breadcrumbs, which will not colour in ten minutes.
- YieldFour servings as a side dish, two as a light supper.
Dishes labelled à la Pompadour, after Louis XV's mistress the Marquise de Pompadour, proliferated in nineteenth-century restaurant and hotel cookery, where a French-sounding tag lent status to what was often a straightforward preparation — here, root vegetables under a cheese béchamel. The name is loosely applied, though some French repertoires do codify a Pompadour garnish, unlike the more settled à la crécy for carrots; in menu writing it often functioned mainly as decoration. What the recipe does show clearly is the household economy behind this kind of book: both vegetables are already cooked, so this is a way of turning yesterday's boiled carrots and potatoes into something worth bringing to the table, using a single ovenproof dish that goes from stove to oven to table without transfer.