Home › Vegetables › Carrots and Peas
Carrots and Peas
2 cups cubed carrots
½ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons butter
1 cup cooked peas, fresh or canned
⅛ teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons sugar
1½ cups milk
3 tablespoons flour
Boil the carrots until tender. Combine with the cooked peas, reheat and serve with melted butter or savory fat or make a sauce of the flour, fat, milk and seasonings, add the cooked carrots and peas, reheat and serve hct.
A plain creamed vegetable dish written in the compressed style of the period, where the ingredient list carries information the method never repeats. Read both together before starting.
- Two dishes in oneThe recipe offers a choice: buttered carrots and peas, or the same vegetables bound in a white sauce. The 3 tablespoons of butter are either melted over the finished vegetables or used to make the roux with the flour, not both.
- The sugar and saltThey are listed, and the method refers to them only obliquely as the sauce's "seasonings." Salt can go into the carrot cooking water, with the sugar alongside it to lift the carrots; the pepper goes into the sauce or over the finished dish.
- Sauce proportions3 tablespoons flour to 3 tablespoons fat and 1½ cups milk is a medium white sauce. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding the milk so it does not taste of raw flour, and simmer the finished sauce a few minutes to thicken properly.
- Carrot cut and timingHalf-inch cubes should boil tender in roughly 10 to 12 minutes. Drain them while they still hold their shape, since they get a second heating in the sauce.
- "Savory fat"Household shorthand for rendered bacon, ham or roast drippings kept in a crock by the stove. Any neutral or meat fat works; drippings give the dish more character than butter.
- Canned peasThese are fully cooked and salted in the tin. Drain, rinse if the brine is heavy, and add them at the last minute so they do not go grey and collapse. Frozen peas need only the time it takes to heat through.
- "Serve hct"A typesetting slip for "hot." It matters more than it looks: a flour-thickened milk sauce skins over and stiffens quickly off the heat.
- YieldThree cups of vegetables in sauce, enough for four as a side dish.
Creamed vegetables of this kind were the backbone of American household cookery between roughly 1890 and 1940, and a book like Butterick's — issued, it is generally said, by a pattern company as a general domestic manual rather than by a chef — appears to assume its reader already knows how to make a white sauce and needs only the proportions. The pairing of carrots and peas owes much of its fixity to canning: peas were among the earliest and cheapest commercially tinned vegetables in the United States, sold year-round when fresh peas had a season of a few weeks, and the combination became a pantry default long before it became a frozen-food cliché. The pinch of sugar with the carrots is an older kitchen habit, generally explained as drawing out the sweetness of storage roots that had spent the winter in a cellar.