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Carrots and Peas
Wash, scrape, and cut young carrots in small cubes or fancy shapes; cook until soft in boiling salted water or stock. Drain, add an equal quantity of cooked green peas, and season with butter, salt, and pepper.
Carrots, Poulette Sauce Wash, scrape, and cut carrots in strips, cubes, or fancy shapes, cover with boiling water, let stand five minutes: drain, and cook in boiling salted water, to which is added one-half tablespoon butter, until soft. Add to recipe for sauce given under Macédoine of Vegetables à la Poulette (see p. 308).
Two short vegetable preparations from Farmer's book: a plain buttered carrot-and-pea dish, and the same carrots finished in a poulette sauce. Both assume you have already read further into the vegetable chapter, which is where the sauce lives.
- Cut size decides the timingSmall dice of young carrots need 8 to 12 minutes in boiling salted water; strips or thicker "fancy shapes" take 15 to 20. Test with a knife tip rather than the clock, and stop while there is still a little resistance if the carrots will sit in sauce afterward.
- Fancy shapesThis is period restaurant styling: carrots turned into olives or barrels with a paring knife, or stamped into rounds and crescents. A small fluted or plain cutter does the job; the point is only that all pieces be the same thickness so they cook evenly.
- The five-minute standIn the poulette version, the raw carrots are covered with boiling water and left to stand five minutes before draining. Farmer does not say why; it functions as a preliminary blanch, and is most worth doing with older or larger carrots.
- Equal quantity of peasBy volume of cooked vegetables, not raw. Frozen peas are the sensible modern substitute and need only two or three minutes; add them to the drained hot carrots rather than boiling them alongside, or they will grey.
- Poulette sauce, in briefThe referenced sauce is a white sauce or veal velouté finished off the heat with egg yolk, cream, and lemon juice. Once the yolk goes in it must not boil or it will curdle and break the sauce; hold it below a simmer and stir the carrots in gently.
- Stock instead of waterFarmer offers stock as an alternative cooking liquid in the plain carrot-and-pea version, and it is the better choice if you have it.
- YieldAbout a pound of carrots and a pound of peas serves six as a side dish. Season at the end; salted cooking water plus butter will already have carried some salt into the vegetables.
Both dishes belong to the French-derived vegetable cookery that Fannie Farmer taught at the Boston Cooking School in the 1890s. Carrots and peas together are the two components of a macédoine reduced to its simplest form; the fuller macédoine appears later in the same chapter, which is why the poulette sauce is not repeated here. Poulette takes its name from the French for a young hen, a sauce family generally traced to the egg-yolk-and-lemon liaisons of eighteenth-century French kitchens and applied there to everything from mussels to tripe to sheep's trotters. That an American household manual expected its readers to keep such a sauce in their working repertoire says a good deal about how thoroughly professional French technique had been absorbed into middle-class New England cooking by the turn of the century.