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Stuffed Carrots
Take some good sized carrots, and after washing them well and cutting off the green tuft, cut each one across about two and a half inches from the leaves. Scoop out the inside yellow part, leaving a case of the redder part and a piece to form the bottom, at the smaller end. Then stew the cases very gently till a little tender, but not quite soft. Take them out of the water, drain them, and then placing each on its small end, fill up with hot chopped mushrooms, that have been tossed in butter. Arrange in a circle on a dish, and garnish with small sprigs of carrot leaves. The insides that you have scooped out are to be used for soup flavoring.
A vegetable course built on the old distinction between a carrot's outer flesh and its paler core. Nothing here is difficult, but the hollowing out is the whole recipe and worth doing carefully.
- The cut that mattersYou are making a cup, not a tube: cut the top two and a half inches off the crown end and hollow that piece downward, leaving the tapered lower section as the base. Old maincrop carrots have a visibly paler, woodier core inside a deeper orange cortex, which is what the recipe means by "the redder part" — modern hybrids show far less contrast, so work by feel and leave walls about a quarter inch thick.
- ToolAn apple corer, a narrow melon baller or a small grapefruit spoon does the scooping. Go slowly at the bottom; puncturing the base means the filling leaks out when you stand it up.
- Buy big and oldSlim young bunched carrots cannot be hollowed. Look for the largest maincrop carrots you can find, ideally over an inch and a half across at the shoulder.
- "Very gently till a little tender"Simmer, do not boil — a rolling boil knocks the thin cases about and they split. Ten to fifteen minutes in salted water is usually enough; they should still meet real resistance at the centre of the wall, since a fully soft case will not stand.
- DrainingSet them upside down on a cloth for a few minutes. Water trapped in the cavity will thin the mushroom filling on the plate.
- The mushroomsChop fine and cook in butter over fairly high heat until the liquid has gone and the pan is dry again; wet mushrooms will run. The recipe gives no seasoning, but a little salt and pepper, and nutmeg if you like it, would not be out of place.
- The leaf garnishCarrot tops are edible and pleasantly parsley-like, but they only look right if the carrots came with fresh green tops attached. Flat-leaf parsley is the obvious substitute.
- Yield and serviceThree or four cases per person as a vegetable course or hot hors d'oeuvre; they are best served warm, straight from draining, as they stiffen and dull as they cool.
- The scooped-out coresThe instruction to save them for soup is not a throwaway line. Simmer them with an onion and a leek for stock, or cook and purée them separately — they are sweeter and softer than the outer flesh.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion of 1914, and it is often said to have been sold in aid of relief funds. That origin shows in dishes like this one: a meatless vegetable course that gets a good deal of presentation out of cheap maincrop carrots, a handful of mushrooms and a little butter, and that throws nothing away, the scooped-out yellow insides to the pot and the leaves to the garnish. Stuffed vegetables of this kind, hollowed and refilled, belong to a wider northern European and French repertoire of légumes farcis, more often made with tomatoes, onions or courgettes; the carrot version is unusual, and the old thick-cored varieties then common in market gardens would have shown more contrast than modern carrots do.