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Stewed Leeks
Trim and wash twenty-four leeks, throw in a kettle of salted, boiling water and boil thirty minutes. Drain, arrange in a heated dish with the bulbs all one way. Put a tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan, when melted add a tablespoonful of flour; mix, and add a half pint of milk. Stir constantly until boiled, add a half teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper; pour over the leeks and serve hot.
A plain white sauce over boiled leeks, from the era when vegetables were cooked until fully soft. Two things need adjusting: the boiling time and the amount of leek.
- Thirty minutes is too longTrimmed leeks are tender in 8-12 minutes in salted boiling water, depending on thickness; a knife should slide into the white with no resistance. Half an hour turns them to grey threads and washes out the flavour the sauce is meant to carry.
- Twenty-four leeksTwenty-four suggests slim leeks rather than the heavy ones sold now, though the recipe does not say. With modern supermarket leeks, 8-10 trimmed to white and pale green will give a comparable quantity. Halve anything thicker than 1.5 inches lengthwise.
- Washing is the real workGrit lodges between the layers at the point where white turns green. Split the tops or fan the layers under running water before boiling; nothing later in the recipe will remove sand.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour that gives a thin pouring sauce, which is correct here — it should coat the leeks, not set around them.
- Cook the roux before the milkLet the butter and flour bubble together a minute before adding liquid, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. Add the milk gradually and stir until it thickens and just boils.
- Drain thoroughlyBoiled leeks hold a surprising amount of water. Stand them on a towel or in the colander for a few minutes, or the sauce will thin into a puddle in the dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; twenty-four leeks would stretch to six or more as a side. A grating of nutmeg in the sauce, or a spoonful of grated cheese, would not be out of place.
Leeks belong to the older layer of European kitchen gardening — hardy, cheap, and available through the winter when little else green was — and they were long treated as the poor relation of the onion in English and American cookery. A book like this prints leeks at a time when they were, in English-speaking kitchens, more often associated with soup than with a dish in their own right. The white-sauce treatment here is the standard nineteenth-century method for making any boiled vegetable presentable at table: butter and flour cooked together, milk stirred in, salt and pepper, poured over. The instruction to arrange the bulbs all one way in a heated dish suggests some care was expected in presenting a humble vegetable at table.