Home › Vegetables › Pickled Carrots
Pickled Carrots
Scrape and wash in cold water six good-sized carrots, cut in slices cross-wise; throw them into a kettle of boiling water, boil until tender, about three-quarters of an hour. Drain, put in a jar and pour over them cold vinegar, add one slice of onion, two bay leaves and a teaspoonful of celery seed. They will be ready to use in twelve hours. These pickled carrots make a delightful garnish for cold meat dishes, potato salad, or may be served following soup with celery, olives, etc.
STEWED CARROTS, No. 1.
Scrape and cut into cubes sufficient carrots to make one pint. throw into a kettle of boiling water; cook threequarters of an hour, then drain. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter in a saucepan, add a half pint of good stock and one tablespoonful of sugar. Boil rapidly ten minutes, take from the fire, add the beaten yolks of two eggs, a half teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper. Drain and dish the carrots, pour the sauce over them while very hot.
Two carrot recipes run together: a quick vinegar pickle meant to be eaten within days, and a stewed carrot dish finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Both are sound, but the timings belong to an era of older, coarser carrots.
- Cut the boiling timeThree-quarters of an hour suits large, mature winter carrots. Modern sliced or cubed carrots are usually tender in 8 to 12 minutes; boil them for 45 minutes and they will collapse into the pickling vinegar.
- This is a refrigerator pickleNothing here is processed or sealed, so the jar is not shelf-stable. Cover the carrots completely with vinegar, refrigerate, and use within two or three weeks. Do not treat it as a canning recipe.
- Which vinegar"Cold vinegar" in a book of this period would have meant ordinary cider or white vinegar, comparable to the roughly 5 percent acidity that is still the supermarket standard. Avoid low-acid specialty or diluted vinegars here, since the acid is doing all the preserving work.
- Warm jar, cold vinegarDrain the carrots well and let them stop steaming before the vinegar goes on, or condensation will dilute the brine. Twelve hours is genuinely enough for sliced carrots to take the flavour; two days is better.
- A pint of carrotsFor the stewed version, a pint measure of cubes is about 9 to 10 oz of prepared carrot, four or so medium ones. That serves three or four as a side.
- "Good stock"Half a pint is one cup, and the stock assumed here would have been homemade and lightly salted or unsalted. Commercial broth is already salted, so hold back the half teaspoonful of salt until you have tasted the finished sauce.
- The egg yolks are the hingeTake the reduced stock off the heat, temper a little of it into the beaten yolks, then return the mixture to the pan and stir over low heat until it thickens to a coating consistency, around 160F. Let it boil and it will scramble.
- Serve at onceThe yolk sauce will not hold or reheat. Have the carrots drained and dished before the sauce is finished, exactly as the original directs.
Pickled carrots of this kind belong to the long tradition of the household "quick pickle" -- vegetables cooked, jarred, covered with vinegar and eaten within the week, quite distinct from the barrels of cucumbers and cabbage put down for winter. The suggested uses give away the period: a garnish for cold meats, a bright note in potato salad, or part of the relish course of celery, olives and pickles that was set on the table after the soup in late Victorian and Edwardian dining. Carrots were cheap, kept well in a root cellar, and coloured a plate at a season when little else did. The stewed version, with its stock, sugar and egg-yolk liaison, reflects the teaching of the English cookery schools, where thickening a sauce with yolks off the heat was standard instruction.