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Baked Carrots
4 cups carrots 1 cup stale bread crumbs 1 tablespoon onion, minced 3 tablespoons melted shortening 1/4 teaspoon pepper 4 tablespoons grated cheese Boil carrots in salted water until tender. Drain and mash well. Add bread crumbs, onion, shortening and pepper and mix. Put into greased baking dish and cover with cheese. Bake in moderate oven (375 degrees) for 15 minutes. Serves 8.
A carrot pudding of the plainest sort: boiled carrots mashed with crumbs and baked just long enough to brown the cheese. The whole character of the dish rests on how dry you get the carrots before mashing.
- Drain hardMashed boiled carrots hold a great deal of water, and wet purée turns the crumbs to paste. Drain in a colander for several minutes, then return the carrots to the dry hot pan over low heat for a minute or two to steam off the surface moisture before mashing.
- Quantity of carrotsFour cups presumably means prepared carrot, sliced or diced before boiling: roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb trimmed and peeled, or about six to eight medium carrots.
- OvenThe book supplies the figure, 375F, which sits at the warm end of what older books called a moderate oven. Fifteen minutes is only enough to heat the mixture through and colour the top, so everything must go into the dish hot.
- ShorteningHere this means vegetable shortening or lard. Melted butter is the better choice and gives the carrots a flavour they otherwise lack; three tablespoons is right either way.
- CheeseUnspecified, as often happens in recipes of this kind; a firm grating cheese was presumably intended. Sharp Cheddar suits the sweetness of the carrot. Four tablespoons is a thin veil over a dish this size, so double it if you want a proper browned crust.
- SaltThe ingredient list carries pepper but no salt, relying entirely on the salted cooking water. Taste the mashed mixture and season it before it goes into the dish.
- Raw onionA tablespoon of minced raw onion will not soften in fifteen minutes and will read as sharp. Sweat it in the shortening or butter first, then add both together.
- Bread crumbsStale crumbs, not dried packaged crumbs, which are much thirstier and will make the mixture stiff. Torn day-old bread pulsed coarse is what is wanted.
- YieldEight servings as a side dish, in a shallow dish of about 1 1/2 quarts. Shallow is better than deep here, since the browned cheese is most of the appeal.
Vegetable dishes bound with bread crumbs and baked under cheese were common in American home cooking in the early decades of the twentieth century, where they served to stretch a modest quantity of vegetable. The technique is a first cousin to the scalloped and au gratin vegetables of the same era, and the reliance on stale bread and a few tablespoons of grated cheese rather than a cream sauce marks it as the thrifty version.