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Carrots and Peas
2 cups cubed carrots 1 cup cooked peas, fresh or canned 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 teaspoons sugar 1 1/2 cups milk Boil the carrots until tender. Combine with the cooked peas, reheat and serve with melted butter or savory fat or make a sauce of the flour, fat milk and seasoning, add the cooked carrots and peas, reheat and serve hot.
A creamed vegetable side from the era when a white sauce was the default finish for anything boiled. The recipe offers two endings and expects you to choose one.
- Pick one finish, not bothThe butter and flour are for the sauce; if you take the first option and just dress the vegetables with melted butter, you use only a little butter and none of the flour or milk. As written the ingredient list covers the sauce version.
- Sauce proportionsThree tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1 1/2 cups milk works out to 2 tablespoons of each per cup of milk, the standard medium white sauce proportion. Cook the flour in the butter a full minute before adding the milk, then simmer two or three minutes after it thickens so it does not taste pasty.
- Sauce quantityThat much sauce will nearly swamp three cups of vegetables. Two tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup of milk gives a coating rather than a soup.
- CarrotsHalf-inch cubes need 8 to 12 minutes in salted boiling water. Drain them well or the water will thin the sauce.
- Peas"Cooked peas, fresh or canned" means they only need warming. Frozen peas work directly here: add them to the hot sauce and give them two minutes. Boiling them again turns them grey.
- The sugarTwo teaspoons in a vegetable side reads oddly now, though sugar with boiled carrots turns up often in cookbooks of the period. Start with half a teaspoon or leave it out.
- "Savory fat"Period shorthand for saved rendered fats: bacon drippings, chicken fat or beef dripping from roasting. Butter is the substitute if you have none.
- YieldServes four as a side.
Creamed vegetables of this kind fill the vegetable chapters of American cookbooks from roughly the 1880s through the 1940s, and the pairing of diced carrots with green peas became fixed enough to carry over into frozen vegetable mixes. The New Delineator Recipes came out of The Delineator, a Butterick magazine that began as a dress-pattern publication and grew a substantial domestic-science department. The alternative of "melted butter or savory fat" is a period detail worth noticing: rendered fats were saved and counted as an ingredient, not a leftover.