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Brussels Carrots
Cut young carrots in small pieces, blanch them in salted water; melt some butter in a stew pan, add enough water and meat extract to make sufficient to cover the carrots, season with pepper, salt and a pinch of sugar and toss the carrots in this till they are tender. Then add the yolk of an egg and a tablespoonful of cream, holding the pan just off the fire with the left hand, while you stir with the right. When it is well mixed pour all out on a vegetable dish and sprinkle over with chopped parsley.
A glazed carrot dish finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The whole thing hangs on that final step: the yolk must warm through without setting, or the sauce breaks into curds.
- The liaison is the hingeTake the pan fully off the heat before the yolk and cream go in, and keep stirring as it thickens in the residual heat. If the sauce is allowed to simmer after the yolk is added, it will scramble; the original's instruction to hold the pan just off the fire is doing real work.
- Meat extractThis means Liebig's Extract of Meat or Bovril, a dark concentrated paste sold in jars. A teaspoon of beef bouillon concentrate or a few tablespoons of well-reduced brown stock in place of some of the water gives the same savoury backing.
- BlanchingTwo to three minutes in salted boiling water for young carrots cut small, then drain. They finish cooking in the buttered stock, so do not take them past the point of being just yielding at the edge.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives only the yolk of one egg and a tablespoonful of cream; the rest is unstated. For about 1 lb of carrots, use 2 tablespoons butter and liquid barely to cover. Serves four as a side.
- Toss, not boilThe carrots should be shaken and turned in a shallow pan over moderate heat so the liquid reduces to a glaze around them, roughly 10 to 15 minutes. A deep pan with too much water will simply boil them.
- The pinch of sugarThe recipe gives no reason for it; in dishes of this kind it is generally there to help the reduced butter and stock lacquer the carrots as much as to sweeten. Many modern carrot varieties are sweeter than older ones, so keep it to a genuine pinch.
- ServingThe sauce is unlikely to survive reheating without splitting. Dress the dish and take it to the table.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck and published in 1915, its recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion of 1914. That origin explains the plainness of the writing here, since these were dictated or written down from memory by home cooks rather than copied from a professional manual, and it may account for the reliance on meat extract, a wartime pantry staple that stood in for the long-simmered stock a settled kitchen would have had. The technique itself, vegetables stewed in butter and stock and then bound off the heat with egg yolk and cream, is standard French and Belgian practice. The name attaches the dish to Brussels rather than to any documented recipe of that city.