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Carrots
Wash, scrub, and scrape. Cook in boiling salted water. Drain, cut in slices, and serve with white sauce; or they may be cut lengthwise and sautéd in butter.
A terse period entry that assumes the cook already knows how long a carrot takes and what white sauce is. Both need filling in.
- No timing is givenWhole young carrots need about 20-25 minutes at a bare boil; older, thicker roots 30-40, or cut them down first and count 10-15 minutes. Test with a knife tip at the thickest point rather than the clock.
- Cook whole, cut afterThe recipe has the carrots sliced only after draining. Carrots cut before boiling are generally reckoned to shed more sugar and colour into the water, and the hot slices take sauce readily.
- ScrapingScraping with a knife back was a common treatment when carrots came out of sand and were sold with skins intact. A swivel peeler does the same job faster, and on genuinely young carrots a hard scrub is enough on its own.
- White sauceRead this as a medium white sauce of the period: roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until the flour loses its raw taste, seasoned with salt and a little pepper. The page itself gives no proportions. A grating of nutmeg is period-appropriate and not out of place.
- Salting the waterAbout a teaspoon of salt per quart. Carrots absorb very little seasoning after cooking, so what goes in the pot matters more than what goes on the plate.
- The sauté variationLengthwise pieces sautéd in butter still want to be tender first, either parboiled or cooked through and then browned. Dry them well before they meet the butter or they will steam rather than colour.
- YieldReckon 1.5 lb of carrots for four as a side dish, a little more if they are large and you are trimming heavily.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its confectionery and chocolate work it carries a full general cookery section. Entries like this one show how much such books left to the cook: no quantities, no times, no definition of white sauce. Boiling a vegetable and masking it in white sauce was a common genteel treatment through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a habit usually traced to French practice filtering into English and then American middle-class kitchens. The alternative given here, cut lengthwise and sautéd in butter, is the plainer of the two.