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Creamed Carrots
Wash and scrape carrots; cut into thin slices. Cover with boiling water and boil until tender. Drain and mix with cream sauce. Sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
A four-sentence recipe that assumes you already know how to make a cream sauce and how much of it to use. The proportions below are the standard ones of the period.
- Cream sauce, definedIn a book of this vintage "cream sauce" means a white sauce of roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk (or half milk and half cream) — what period books call a medium sauce — cooked until it coats a spoon and seasoned with salt and pepper. Make it while the carrots boil so it goes on hot.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. Figure 1 1/2 lb carrots and 1 to 1 1/2 cups sauce to serve four as a side dish.
- Cut and timingThin slices, about 1/8 inch, are tender in 8 to 12 minutes; older thick carrots cut thicker will want closer to 20. Test with a knife tip rather than watching the clock, and stop while they still hold their shape — carrots collapse into sweet mush quickly once they turn.
- Salt the waterNothing in the recipe seasons the carrots themselves, only the sauce. A teaspoon of salt in the boiling water fixes the flat middle this dish otherwise has.
- Drain thoroughlyLet the carrots sit in the colander a minute and shake them dry. Water carried over from the pot is the usual reason a creamed vegetable ends up thin in the dish.
- ScrapingYoung carrots of the sort the book assumes only needed scraping with a knife back. Modern supermarket carrots are larger and tougher-skinned; a peeler is the sensible tool.
- FinishingA grating of nutmeg in the sauce is period-appropriate and sharpens a dish that is otherwise all milk and sugar; a squeeze of lemon at the end is a modern addition rather than a period one. Add the parsley off the heat so it stays green.
Creamed vegetables were a backbone of the American middle-class table for decades around the turn of the twentieth century: almost anything boiled — carrots, peas, onions, celery, salsify, potatoes — could be lifted into a "company" dish by pouring white sauce over it, and cookbooks of the era return again and again to the same brief formula with the vegetable swapped out. The technique descends from the French sauce béchamel, thoroughly domesticated by the time it reached books like this one, where the cream sauce is a household staple rather than a set piece. The New Royal Cook Book was published as promotional literature by the makers of Royal Baking Powder, and a vegetable section like this one helps the volume serve as a general household reference; its recipes are correspondingly brief and assume a cook who already knows the basics.