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Flemish Carrots
Take some young carrots, wash and brush them as tenderly as you would an infant, then simmer them till tender in with pepper and salt. When cooked, draw them to the side of the fire and pour in some cream to make a good sauce. If you cannot use cream, take milk instead and stir with it the yolk of an egg. To thicken for use, add a pinch of sugar and some chopped parsley. Aubergine or Egg Plant This purple fruit is, like the tomato, always cooked as a vegetable. It is like the brinjal of the East. It is hardly necessary to give special recipes for the dressing of aubergines, for you can see their possibilities at a glance. They can be stuffed with white mince in a white sauce, when you would cut the fruit in half, remove some of the interior, fill up with mince and sauce, replace the top, and bake for twenty minutes, or simply cut in halves and stewed in stock, with pepper and salt they are good, or you can simmer them gently in water and when ready to serve, pour over them a white sauce as for vegetable marrow. If they are cheap in England the following entree would be inexpensive and would look nice.
Egg Plants as Souffle Wash the fruit, cut them lengthways, remove the inside. Fill each half with a mixture made of beaten egg, grated cheese, and some fine breadcrumbs, and a dash of mustard. Put the halves to bake for a quarter of an hour, or till the souffle mixture has risen. When cooked place them in an oval dish with a border of rice turned out from a border mold.
Two recipes run together here: a simple braise of young carrots finished with cream, and a set of notes on aubergine ending in a stuffed "souffle". Both assume a cook who knows what a white sauce is and needs no hand-holding.
- The missing word"Simmer them till tender in with pepper and salt" has lost a word in setting; the liquid is not named. Given the title, butter with water barely to cover is a reasonable reconstruction: use a wide pan, a knob of butter, water barely to cover, and let it cook away rather than draining it off.
- The hinge: the egg yolkIf you take the milk-and-yolk option, the pan must be off direct heat — "draw them to the side of the fire" is the whole instruction. Milk thickened with yolk curdles above roughly 180F. Temper a little hot liquid into the yolk first, return it, and stir until it coats a spoon.
- "To thicken for use"The sugar and parsley do not thicken anything; the phrase is loose usage for finishing the dish. A pinch of sugar with young carrots is worth keeping.
- Young carrotsThe recipe means genuinely small spring carrots, cooked whole — hence the brushing rather than peeling. Supermarket "baby carrots" are lathe-cut mature ones and will not behave the same; use small bunched carrots with tops, scrubbed.
- Baking the stuffed aubergineNo temperature is given anywhere, and the book never states oven temperatures. A brisk oven, around 400F, is a workable modern setting. Twenty minutes at that heat will not fully soften a raw aubergine shell, so salt, oil and pre-roast the halves before filling.
- BrinjalThe book's comparison is exact: brinjal is simply the Anglo-Indian name for the same vegetable, from Portuguese berinjela. No substitution is implied.
- The border moldA ring mold packed with cooked rice, turned out onto an oval platter with the aubergines in the centre. A softly cooked short-grain rice holds the shape best.
- YieldNeither recipe gives quantities. Reckon 1 lb of carrots and about 1/2 cup of cream for four; one aubergine half per person as an entree, with two eggs, 2 oz grated cheese and a handful of breadcrumbs filling four halves.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in England during the First World War, its recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled the 1914 invasion and were being housed by British families. That accounts for the odd double address of this page: the carrots are Flemish home cooking, buttered and finished with cream in the manner still standard across Flanders, while the aubergine notes read as though written by and for an English reader who might never have bought one — hence the explaining of what the "purple fruit" is and the aside about whether it is cheap in England. Aubergine was then a luxury greengrocer's item in Britain, familiar mainly through Mediterranean and Anglo-Indian cooking, which is why the book reaches for brinjal as the point of reference. The tone throughout — carrots washed as tenderly as an infant, possibilities seen at a glance — belongs to a genre of wartime cookbook that arguably sold sympathy for the refugees along with the recipes.