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Carrot Jam (to imitate Apricot Pre- serve)
INGREDIENTS.-Carrots; to every lb. of carrot pulp allow 1 lb. of pounded sugar, the grated rind of 1 lemon, the strained juice of 2, 6 chopped bitter almonds, 2½ tablespoonfuls of brandy. AVERAGE COST per lb., 6d.
CARROT PUDDING.
Select young carrots; wash and scrape them clean, cut them into round pieces, put them into a saucepan with sufficient water to cover them, and let them simmer until perfectly soft; then beat them through a sieve. Weigh the pulp, and to every lb. allow the above ingredients. Put the pulp into a preserving-pan with the sugar, and let this boil for 5 minutes, stirring and skimming all the time. When cold, add the lemon-rind and juice, almonds and brandy; mix these well with the jam; then put it into pots, which must be well covered and kept in a dry place. The brandy may be omitted, but the preserve will then not keep with the brandy it will remain good for months.
TIME.-About hour to boil the carrots; 5 minutes to simmer the pulp.
SEASONABLE from July to December.
Carrot Pudding, Baked or Boiled. INGREDIENTS for pudding for 5 or 6 persons. lb. of bread-crumbs, 4 oz. of suet, lb. of stoned raisins, lb. of carrot, 1/4 lb. of currants, 3 oz. of sugar, 2 eggs, milk, a little nutmeg. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Boil the carrots until tender enough to mash to a pulp; add the remaining ingredients, and moisten with sufficient milk to make the pudding of the consistency of thick batter. If to be boiled, put the mixture into a buttered basin, tie it down with a cloth, and boil CARROTS. for 2½ hours; if to be baked, put it into a pie-dish, and bake for nearly an hour; turn it out of the dish, strew sifted sugar over it, and serve.
TIME.-2 hours to boil; 1 hour to bake.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
The carrot jam calls for six chopped bitter almonds, which puts it out of reach of a modern kitchen. The points below explain the problem and the few other places where the entry needs reading with care.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed or chewed. They were readily available in Victorian Britain as an almond flavouring, and their retail sale is now restricted or prohibited in a number of countries, including the United States, for that reason. Six chopped raw bitter almonds stirred into cold jam is not a quantity to experiment with, and nothing in this method destroys the compound -- the recipe adds them after the boiling is done.
- Why they are here at allThe apricot imitation depends entirely on the bitter almond: it is the benzaldehyde note that reads as apricot kernel. Without it the preserve is simply sweetened carrot pulp with lemon, so the recipe cannot be rescued by leaving the nuts out and calling it the same thing. Use a current preserve recipe if you want apricot jam or a carrot conserve.
- Preserving without a sealThe jam is boiled only five minutes, then lemon juice and brandy are stirred in cold and the pots merely "well covered." That is a period keeping method that relies on sugar and spirit rather than on a heat-processed seal, and it will not meet any modern standard for shelf-stable jam.
- Bread-crumbs and suet, for the puddingThe second entry is an old-fashioned steamed or baked suet pudding of the plum-pudding family. Suet means shredded beef kidney fat; packet shredded suet, beef or vegetable, is the usual substitute and behaves the same way.
- Sifted sugar"Sifted sugar" over the turned-out pudding means a fine pounded and sifted sugar, nearer modern caster or icing sugar than granulated.
- CostsThe average costs quoted, sixpence a pound and one shilling, are pre-decimal Victorian retail prices and are of historical interest only.
Mrs Beeton's household books are full of these polite impersonations, of which carrot standing in for apricot is one. Carrots are one of the sweetest vegetables available cheaply through the winter, and boiled to a pulp with an equal weight of sugar -- as here, 1 lb. of sugar to 1 lb. of pulp -- they set into something with roughly the colour and body of apricot preserve, which was expensive and seasonal. The missing flavour is borrowed from bitter almonds, whose kernels share an aromatic compound with apricot and peach stones, so the imitation tasted of the fruit's own kernel. Carrot puddings appear in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward. Both recipes are seasonal in a way modern shopping is not, and Beeton's "seasonable" lines reflect when field carrots were to be had.