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Creamed Carrots
Boil carrots, which have been cut in long, thin strips. Drain if necessary, add salt and pepper. Make a cupful of white sauce separately, and add the carrots, cooking gently just a few minutes.
A plain vegetable side that depends entirely on the sauce being right and the carrots not being cooked twice into mush.
- Cut and quantity"Long, thin strips" suggests something like a julienne or batonnet cut. The recipe gives no weight of carrots; a pound or so would suit the cupful of sauce specified.
- Boil brieflyStrips this thin need only a few minutes in salted boiling water. They will cook further in the sauce, so pull them while still firm at the centre.
- The white sauceA cupful of medium white sauce is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes raw and pasty.
- Season the sauce, not just the carrotsThe recipe salts the drained carrots, but the sauce carries most of the flavour. Salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg in the sauce make more difference than seasoning the vegetable alone.
- "Cooking gently"Two or three minutes over low heat is enough to warm through and let the carrots take up the sauce. Hard boiling risks scorching the sauce and softening the strips past the point of the deliberate cut.
- Drain properly"Drain if necessary" is understated. Water clinging to the carrots thins the sauce; let them steam dry in the colander for a minute first.
Creamed vegetables were a mainstay of American home cooking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a butter-flour-milk sauce was a common way to turn a plain boiled vegetable into a dish for the table. A rotation of creamed carrots, creamed peas and creamed onions gave variety from a single sauce learned once.