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Leeks
Wash and trim the leeks and cook them in boiling salted water until soft. Drain thoroughly; season with butter, salt and pepper, and serve.
A bare-bones treatment that assumes the cook already knows how much grit a leek can hide. The washing is the whole recipe.
- Washing means splittingGrit lodges between the layers where rinsing the outside will never reach it. Trim the roots and the tough dark tops, split each leek lengthwise, and fan the layers under running water, or soak the halves in a bowl of cold water and lift them out rather than pouring off.
- "Until soft" is 8 to 12 minutesHalved leeks of average thickness are done when a knife slides through the white with no resistance. Whole thick winter leeks may want 15 minutes or more; undercooked leek is stringy, so err on the long side.
- Salt the water properlyLeeks are watery and absorb seasoning poorly after the fact. About a tablespoon of salt per 4 quarts gets the flavor into the vegetable rather than sitting on it.
- Drain thoroughly means what it saysBoiled leeks hold water between the layers and will flood the dish. Stand them on a rack or a folded towel, cut side down, for a few minutes before buttering.
- Butter quantityThe book gives none. Figure 1 to 2 tablespoons for a pound of trimmed leeks, tossed while they are hot enough to melt it.
- YieldA pound of leeks as bought trims down to roughly half that in usable white and pale green, serving two as a side dish.
- Worth addingA little white sauce, or a squeeze of lemon with chopped parsley, is a common finish for boiled leeks and works with this seasoning without contradicting it.
Leeks belong to the oldest layer of the European kitchen garden — grown around the Mediterranean in antiquity, hardy enough to stand through a northern winter, and long associated with Wales, where the leek has been worn as a national emblem since at least the sixteenth century. In American cookbooks of this period they appear more often in soups than as a vegetable served on their own. The book was sold as loose sheets so that a housekeeper could file and reorder them; the entries are correspondingly short — roughly a paragraph per vegetable, with no discussion.