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Flemish Carrots
1 quart carrots sliced 1 quart boiling water 3/4 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons shortening 1 onion sliced 1 teaspoon sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 1/2 cups soup stock 1 sprig parsley, chopped Cook carrots in boiling water and salt until tender. Drain. Brown onion in shortening, add carrots, seasoning and soup stock and simmer 30 minutes. Add parsley and serve. Serves 8.
A two-stage braise: carrots are boiled, then finished in stock with browned onion. The second stage is where the flavour comes from, so keep the first one short.
- A quart of sliced carrotsVegetables were routinely measured by volume in books of this type. A quart of sliced carrots is 4 cups, roughly 1 1/4 lb of trimmed carrots — six to eight medium ones.
- Undercook the first boilThe recipe says to boil until tender, but the carrots then simmer another 30 minutes in stock. Boil them only until barely yielding, a few minutes for thin slices, or they will collapse into the sauce.
- ShorteningIn an American book of this type this means hydrogenated vegetable shortening or lard. Butter is the better choice here and browns the onion more sweetly; 3 tablespoons is right for a 10-inch pan.
- Soup stockHousehold stock of the day was whatever the week's bones produced, and often only lightly salted. Use a light chicken or beef stock and taste before adding the second 1/2 teaspoon of salt, since commercial broth is already salted.
- Reduce, don't just simmerThirty minutes uncovered lets the 1 1/2 cups of stock cook down to a glaze that coats the carrots. Covered, you get carrots in thin broth. Leave the lid off and shake the pan toward the end.
- The sugarOne teaspoon is a seasoning, not a candying. It sharpens the carrots' own sweetness against the onion; skip it only if your carrots are already very sweet.
- YieldEight portions as written is a side-dish serving of about half a cup each.
Carrots "Flemish" or "à la flamande" is an old name for carrots finished in butter and stock, sometimes bound with egg yolk and cream in the fuller French version; the plainer form here, with browned onion and parsley, is the domestic-science adaptation. American cookbooks of the era borrowed continental dish names to give variety to a limited winter vegetable list — carrots, onions and parsley being three things a household could count on having.