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Creamed Carrots
3 cups diced, cooked carrots 1 cup white sauce To prepare the carrots, select two large or three medium-sized carrots, wash and scrape, and drop at once into cold water to prevent discoloration. Cut into half-inch cubes, or if preferred, cut lengthwise into quarters, and then into one-inch pieces. Steam or cook in boiling water--salted--one or two hours, or until tender. Prepare white sauce or cream sauce. Drain the carrots, and add the sauce; reheat and serve. Or instead of the sauce, put the diced carrots in a sauce pan with 1 tablespoon of butter, 1 teaspoon of sugar, half a teaspoon of salt and 1 gill of water and cook until all the liquid is absorbed.
A plain vegetable dish from a period when carrots were routinely cooked to collapse. Nearly everything here holds up except the timing.
- Ignore the one-to-two hoursHalf-inch dice of carrot are tender in 8 to 12 minutes in boiling salted water, or 12 to 15 minutes steamed. An hour or more leaves them waterlogged and flavourless, and most of the sweetness ends up in the cooking water.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The second method is a straightforward glaze: butter, sugar, salt and water reduced until the liquid coats the carrots. Watch it at the end, as the last of the water goes quickly and the sugar will catch.
- White sauce, unspecifiedThe book assumes you know the ratio. For 1 cup of medium sauce, cook 2 tablespoons butter with 2 tablespoons flour for a minute or two without colouring, then whisk in 1 cup milk and simmer until it thickens. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg.
- The cold-water soakScraped carrots do darken slightly on standing, and dropping them in water prevents it. With modern carrots cooked within the hour it makes little practical difference, though it does keep them crisp if you prep ahead.
- Scraping versus peelingThe recipe calls for scraping, which suits thin-skinned carrots. A vegetable peeler on ordinary supermarket carrots does the same job faster; take off as little as possible.
- Salt the water properlySince the carrots are drained and sauced, the boiling water is the only chance to season them from within. It should taste distinctly salty.
- YieldThree cups of diced carrots with a cup of sauce serves four as a side, two if it is standing in as the main dish.
White sauce was a standard treatment for vegetables in cookbooks of this period, appearing over carrots, celery, onions, cabbage and potatoes alike; a flour-and-butter sauce enriched with milk supplied fat and body that a boiled vegetable alone did not. The alternative given here, butter and sugar reduced with a little water, is the French technique of glazing, and it is the more interesting of the two now that carrots are sweeter and are no longer boiled for an hour before anyone tastes them.