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Carrots, Old
Scrape and wash the carrots and cut them in slices. Boil them one hour in plenty of water; then drain off all but a half cup of the water, and add to the carrots one teaspoon of sugar, and one of salt. Boil rapidly until the water is all evaporated. Cover the carrots with milk, and thicken this to a cream with a little flour wet to a smooth paste with cold milk. Add butter, salt and pepper to taste, and serve hot. Carrots may also be cooked the same as beets, adding butter, salt and pepper after draining off the water, and serving them after thorough heating. Or they may be boiled whole with corned beef, and served as a garnish around the meat. It improves their appearance to cut them into half-inch slices and then shape them with tin cutters.
A creamed carrot dish from the era when "old" carrots meant the coarse, storage-cellar roots of late winter rather than anything young or sweet. The method is sound; the timings belong to a vegetable much tougher than what you will buy today.
- "Old" carrotsThe title distinguishes mature winter-stored carrots from young ones. Storage carrots are woodier and coarser, which is presumably why they get an hour of boiling; the teaspoon of sugar suggests the book did not expect much sweetness from them. A supermarket carrot needs neither.
- The hour of boilingSliced carrots are tender in 8 to 12 minutes in salted water. An hour reduces them to mush and leaches out most of the flavour and colour. Cook until a knife meets slight resistance, then proceed with the reserved half cup of liquid.
- The glazing stepBoiling rapidly with sugar, salt and a half cup of water until the liquid evaporates is a glaze, and it is the part of the recipe worth keeping. Watch the last minute closely, since the pan goes from syrupy to scorched quickly.
- Thickening the milkSlaking the flour in cold milk before it goes into the hot milk is what keeps the sauce smooth. About a tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk gives the "cream" consistency intended; add it off the boil, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- "Cooked the same as beets"If the book's beet method is the usual one of boiling whole in the skin, then peeling and dressing, boiling carrots whole and unpeeled does preserve more flavour, but adds 20 to 30 minutes depending on thickness.
- Tin cuttersThe small tinned-steel vegetable cutters of the period are the ancestors of today's aspic and canapé cutters. Any small metal cutter will do the same job on half-inch rounds.
- YieldNot stated. Reckon on about 1 1/2 lb of carrots and a cup of milk to serve four as a side dish.
Creamed vegetables were a common American treatment for produce from the winter cellar, and the sequence here — boil, glaze with a little sugar, then bind with a milk-and-flour sauce — amounts to a thin white sauce built in the same pan. The assumption behind the title is worth noting: a household that bought carrots by the barrel or dug them from a pit in autumn worked through them until spring, so a recipe had to acknowledge that a January carrot was a different vegetable from a June one. The closing note about tin cutters reflects a period fondness for shaped garnishes around a platter of meat.