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Creamed Vegetables
Prepare and cook vegetables by either stewing or boiling them. When ready to serve, pour over white sauce.
A skeleton instruction of the kind common in early household manuals, which assumed the reader already had a white sauce recipe a few pages back. The whole success of the dish rests on two things the text leaves out: how the vegetables are drained and how thick the sauce is.
- The white sauceThe recipe assumes a white sauce given elsewhere in the book. The familiar proportions are 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour per cup of milk for a thin sauce, 2 tablespoons of each for a medium one, cooked until the flour loses its raw taste and seasoned with salt and white pepper. The thinner sauce suits watery vegetables such as peas or asparagus, the fuller one potatoes and onions.
- Drain hard, and dryThis is the hinge. Vegetables that go into the sauce wet will thin it within a minute and the dish separates on the plate. Drain in a colander, then return to the dry hot pan for a few seconds to drive off surface moisture.
- Cooking timesThe recipe gives no times. Cook to just tender: peas 3-5 minutes, cauliflower florets 5-6, carrots or turnips in dice 8-10, potatoes in chunks 15-18.
- Vegetables that suit itPotatoes, carrots, turnips, celery, onions, peas, green beans, cauliflower, spinach and dried corn all take white sauce well. Beets will bleed colour into the sauce and cabbage can turn it sulphurous if overcooked, though both were creamed in their own right.
- Combine off the heatFold the vegetables into the finished sauce rather than pouring sauce over them in the serving dish, so every piece is coated. If it must wait, hold it over hot water, not over direct heat, or the milk will scorch.
- QuantitiesOne cup of sauce dresses roughly 3 to 4 cups of cooked vegetables, serving four. Any more than that and the vegetable disappears into the milk.
- Seasoning at the endThe recipe mentions no seasoning at all, so taste after combining. A grating of nutmeg is a traditional finish for creamed spinach, cauliflower and onions.
Creamed vegetables belong to the age of the flour-and-milk sauce, which was already present in American cookbooks well before the cookery-school movement of the 1880s and 1890s popularised it as the default way to make plain boiled vegetables into a dish worth putting on a table. Books aimed at new housekeepers taught white sauce early and then referred back to it constantly, so a page like this is less a recipe than a cross-reference: learn the sauce once, and dinner has a dozen variations. The habit outlasted its origins, running through mid-century canned-soup casseroles and creamed onions at Thanksgiving. It also reflects a period when vegetables were boiled long and hard, and a rich coating sauce did useful work covering for what the boiling had taken away.