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Stewed Carrots
Pare and cut into dice 2 good-sized carrots, cover with boiling water, add 1 teaspoonful of salt and let them simmer for two hours or until tender. When done, drain, and pour over them a cream sauce.
A plain boiled-and-sauced vegetable of the sort that fills the cheaper cookbooks. Almost everything here still works; the timing does not.
- The two hoursDiced carrots are tender in 12 to 20 minutes in salted boiling water, depending on the size of the dice and the age of the root. Two hours reduces them to a sweet mush that will collapse when you stir in the sauce. Test with a knife tip at 12 minutes and drain the moment they give.
- Why the old timing existedWhy the old timing may have existed -- Carrots stored in sand or a root cellar through to spring can go woody at the core, and period field varieties were likely coarser than modern eating carrots. Long simmering was probably insurance against a tough centre rather than a rule about carrots as such.
- Cut sizeThe recipe says only 'dice' and gives no measurement; half-inch cubes work well. Cut them evenly, or the small pieces will be falling apart while the large ones are still firm.
- The saltA teaspoon in enough water to cover two carrots is on the heavy side by modern habit; half that is plenty, especially if the cream sauce is also seasoned.
- The cream sauceThe book assumes you know it: a basic white sauce of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked out for a minute or two before the liquid goes in, seasoned with salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. That quantity coats two carrots generously.
- Drain thoroughlyLet the carrots steam dry in the colander for a minute before saucing. Water clinging to the dice will thin the sauce and make it slide off.
- YieldTwo good-sized carrots serve two, or three as a small side dish. The recipe scales directly.
Stewed carrots with a white or cream sauce is the standard nineteenth-century treatment of a cheap root: carrots kept well through winter, cost little, and a flour-and-milk sauce turned a watery boiled vegetable into something that ate as a dish rather than a garnish. The technique belongs to the white sauce tradition — in origin generally traced to French practice — applied to whatever was in the cellar, and similar treatments are often found over other roots as well. Carrots are sometimes said to have grown sweeter through breeding, though the story mainly concerns twentieth-century varieties, and orange carrots reputed to be sweet were already common in nineteenth-century Europe; in any case old recipes lean on butter and cream.