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Carrots, Young
Young carrots are appetizing when boiled, drained dry and serve with butter. The French make a delicious mixture of carrots, peas and beans, boiling them together, draining quite dry and serving with a sauce blanche poured over it.
A sketch rather than a formula, in the style of turn-of-the-century vegetable entries that assumed the cook already knew how long to boil a carrot. Two things need filling in: the timing and the sauce.
- Sauce blancheA plain French white sauce: equal weights butter and flour cooked without colouring, let down with the vegetable cooking water or light stock rather than milk, seasoned with salt and a little lemon. Roughly 1 tbsp each butter and flour to 1 cup liquid gives a light pouring sauce; 2 tbsp of each per cup for something that coats. It is not bechamel, which is milk-based.
- Cooking timeWhole young carrots take 10-15 minutes in salted boiling water depending on thickness; cut into batons, 6-8. Some period cookbooks gave considerably longer boiling times, particularly for older roots, which is part of what gave boiled carrots their reputation.
- Boiling them togetherPeas, beans and carrots do not cook at the same rate. Start the carrots, add green beans after about five minutes, and the peas in the last two or three, or cook each separately and combine. Boiling all three from the start leaves the peas collapsed.
- Draining quite dryThe instruction is repeated in both sentences and it is the point of the dish. Return the drained vegetables to the dry hot pan for thirty seconds to steam off surface water, or the sauce will slacken and pool.
- Young carrotsMeans genuinely small, thin-skinned carrots that need only scrubbing, not the trimmed and tumbled "baby" carrots sold in bags, which are mature roots cut down and hold more water. Bunched carrots with tops attached are the closest match.
- YieldReckon on 4-6 oz of prepared vegetables per person as a side dish; about 1 1/2 lb total serves four.
The second dish here is a macédoine de légumes in all but name — the French preparation of several vegetables cooked and combined, usually diced, and dressed with butter or a white sauce. Butterick's cookbook, published by the pattern company for a broad middle-class American readership, leans on French terms like sauce blanche without translating them, which says a good deal about how far French culinary vocabulary had spread through American home cooking. The carrot is often said to have had a slightly humble standing in nineteenth-century Anglo-American kitchens, associated with soups, stews and animal fodder; presenting young ones whole, buttered, and dry is a deliberate gesture toward treating them as a vegetable worth eating on its own terms.