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Chicory with Cream
Wash a quarter of a peck of chicory, throw in a large kettle of salted water and boil half an hour. Then drain and throw into a pan of cold water five minutes. Drain and press gently until dry. Chop fine, put into a saucepan with two ounces of butter, a teaspoonful of sugar, a teaspoonful of salt and a grating of nutmeg; then sprinkle over an even tablespoonful of flour. Mix all this well together, add a gill of thick cream, stirring over the fire until boiling hot. Take from the fire. Beat the yolks of three eggs until light, add two tablespoonfuls of cream, stir this into the chicory. Turn into a heated dish and serve garnished with hard-boiled eggs.
CORN BOILED ON THE coB.
Corn should be cooked as quickly as possible after picking, as it heats and loses its sweetness. If necessary to keep over night, spread it out singly on the cold cellar floor; do this as quickly as you receive it. Do not open or tear the husks until ready to boil it. Then remove the husks and every thread of silk. Have ready a kettle of boiling water, throw in the corn and boil, after it begins to boil, five minutes. Long boiling destroys both the color and flavor of the corn and renders it indigestible. When done, take out carefully with a skimmer, place on a corncloth or napkin, throw the corners over to prevent the steam escaping; serve immediately.
While perhaps it is rather unusual to give recipes "how to eat," it is certainly an art to know just how to eat corn. Score every row of grains with a sharp knife, spread lightly with butter, dust with salt, and with the teeth press out the centre of the grains, leaving every hull fast to the cob. Corn thus eaten will not cause trouble or produce indigestion, as the hull is the only indigestible part. Small wooden skewers with quills of paper may be stuck in the ends of the cob and used as holders.
Two things run together on this page: a creamed chicory in the French manner, and a short essay on corn on the cob. The chicory is the recipe proper, and it is essentially a bitter green finished with a butter-flour-cream liaison and thickened off the heat with yolks.
- What chicory means hereNot the root sold as a coffee substitute, and not the small pale Belgian endive heads. This calls for the leafy green chicory of the market garden — curly endive, escarole, or the broad-leaved sort sold as Italian chicory or catalogna. Any bitter chicory-family green works.
- A quarter of a peckA peck is 8 dry quarts, so a quarter peck is 2 quarts by volume, i.e. a bulk measure of loose leaves rather than a weight. Buy generously; the loss in boiling and pressing is severe.
- A gillHalf a cup. "Thick cream" means heavy cream; a richer cream gives the smoothest result here, and a very light cream will make a thinner sauce.
- Half an hour is too longThirty minutes in salted water would have suited tough field-grown chicory, and may well have been intended to tame its bitterness. Modern greens are milder and more tender: 8 to 12 minutes at a hard boil is enough, then straight into cold water to set the color, as directed.
- Press it genuinely dryThis is the hinge. Any water left in the leaves will thin the cream and leave the dish soupy. The recipe says to press gently; in practice squeeze the drained greens firmly in a towel before chopping, and chop fine rather than coarse so the sauce coats rather than pools.
- The yolks must not boilTake the pan off the heat before the yolk-and-cream mixture goes in, and let the residual warmth thicken it — 30 seconds of stirring. If it returns to a simmer the yolks scramble and the sauce turns grainy. Serve at once; it will not hold or reheat.
- Flour quantityOne level tablespoon of flour into 2 oz butter and half a cup of cream makes a light binding, not a thick sauce. Sprinkle it over the hot buttered greens and cook a minute before the cream goes in, or it will taste raw.
- YieldEnough for four as a side dish. The recipe calls for a garnish of hard-boiled eggs; quartered is the easiest way to arrange them.
- The corn noteThe five-minute boil and the warning against long cooking are both sound and still standard practice. The claim that scoring the rows and pressing out the kernels prevents indigestion is period folk reasoning rather than fact, though it does make neat eating.
Creamed chicory sits alongside dishes like creamed spinach and creamed sorrel: a bitter or acidic green blanched hard, chopped, and softened with butter, cream and a yolk liaison in the French manner that American cookbook writers of the later nineteenth century were adapting for domestic kitchens. The long boil in salted water followed by a cold plunge appears in a number of contemporary treatments of bitter greens, which were generally grown outdoors and picked mature. The nutmeg and the teaspoon of sugar recur in similar recipes; the sugar reads as a check on bitterness rather than a sweetener. The corn passage that follows mixes instruction with commentary on digestion, and the concern with kernel hulls as "the only indigestible part" reflects the period's wider interest in what the stomach could manage.