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Stewed
3 good-sized carrots, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1/2 pint of milk, CARROTS, No. 2.
1 teaspoonful of salt, 1 tablespoonful of flour, Salt and pepper to taste.
Pare and quarter the carrots. Put them in a saucepan and cover with boiling water; add the salt and let them boil one hour and a half. When done, drain, place them on a hot dish and stand over boiling water to keep warm. Put the butter in a frying pan, let it melt; add the flour and mix. Do not brown. Now add the milk, salt and pepper. Stir until it boils and is smooth. Pour over the carrots and serve.
A plain boiled carrot finished in a white sauce. The one thing to change is the boiling time.
- The hour and a halfQuartered carrots need 10-15 minutes in boiling salted water to reach tender, or 20 if the pieces are thick. An hour and a half reduces them to waterlogged pulp and leaches out most of the sweetness. Test with a knife tip and drain as soon as they yield.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup in US measure, 10 fl oz if you are working from a British edition. Either makes a pourable sauce with the quantity of flour given.
- The sauce is thin by designOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk gives a light coating sauce, not a thick one. Cook the flour and butter together a full minute before adding milk so the paste loses its raw taste, but keep the heat low enough that it takes no colour.
- Add the milk graduallyWhisk in a little at a time rather than all at once; the roux is small and lumps form easily. Bring it to a simmer to thicken fully before it goes over the carrots.
- Salt appears twiceThe teaspoon of salt goes in the boiling water. The sauce gets its own salt and pepper to taste, and should be seasoned after it has thickened.
- Keeping them warmStanding the drained carrots over boiling water works, but a covered dish is enough if the sauce is only a few minutes behind. Prolonged holding continues to soften them.
- YieldThree good-sized carrots serve three or four as a side dish. Doubling is straightforward; scale the sauce with the same one-to-one butter and flour ratio.
Boiling a vegetable and masking it in a flour-thickened milk sauce was the standard English and American treatment for almost anything from the kitchen garden through the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of this type ran numbered variations on the same vegetable; the heading “CARROTS, No. 2” indicates that at least one other carrot recipe stood nearby. The very long boiling times these books specify are usually attributed to older, coarser field carrots and to what may have been a prevailing belief that vegetables were indigestible unless thoroughly softened; the shift toward brief cooking and firm texture belongs largely to the twentieth century.