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Carrot Fritters
Beat into pulp a large boiled carrot, pass it through a sieve and mix in two tablespoonful of cream, stirring in two well-beaten eggs. Put a piece of lard in a fryingpan, and when this is hot, shape the mixture into fritters and fry them. When done, place them on a hot dish and serve with brown sauce. Carrots, Housekeeper's Style Peel some young carrots and leave them in cold water for a short time; slice them thin and put them into a stewpan half full of good broth, season with salt, pepper, mace and a bunch of sweet herbs and parsley, and stew until they are tender. When done, put them on a dish. Mix some flour with a little liquor in a cup, stir it in with the other and add a piece of butter and a little browning. When thick, pour it over the carrots, and serve. Carrots, Maitre d'Hotel Scrape a number of carrots, cut them in halves lengthwise and boil them in salted water. When they are tender, take them out of the water, place them in a stewpan with a lump of butter, some chopped parsley, pepper, salt and sugar, squeezing the juice of a lemon over them. Toss them about over a moderate fire for a few minutes then pour them on a hot dish, and serve.
Three carrot preparations run together in one block here, as they often do in Oscar's book where the compositor set entries end to end. The fritters are the first; the other two are simple braises and need almost nothing said about them.
- The binder problemOne carrot, two tablespoons cream and two eggs will not hold a shape in hot fat — it is closer to a custard than a batter. The recipe names no binder, but in practice you need two to three tablespoons of flour or fine dry crumbs worked into the drained purée, then a rest of fifteen minutes before frying.
- Dry the puréeBoiled carrot carries a great deal of water. After sieving, return the pulp to a dry pan over low heat and stir until it stops steaming and pulls from the sides. Wet purée is the main reason these fritters collapse.
- "A piece of lard"Shallow fat, about half an inch, at 350–375F. Lard was one of the common frying fats of the 1890s; any neutral fat with a high smoke point works. Fry in batches, three to four minutes total, turning once.
- Brown sauceMost likely espagnole or a demi-glace — a brown roux slackened with beef stock, rather than a bottled gravy. A good reduced beef stock thickened with beurre manié is the practical substitute.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; one large carrot makes only a small quantity, enough for two as a side. Scale up in whole units of carrot and egg.
- Mace, in the second recipeBlade mace, the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed, sold ground or in blades. Ground nutmeg is the nearest substitute; use a little less, as it reads sweeter.
- "A little browning"Gravy browning — burnt sugar caramel sold in bottles, used chiefly to darken sauces, with only a faint flavour of its own. Kitchen Bouquet and similar products still exist; a teaspoon of dark soy (which will also add salt) or a spoonful of your own burnt-sugar caramel will darken the sauce similarly.
- The maître d'hôtel timingHalved carrots take fifteen to twenty minutes in salted water depending on thickness. Pull them while they still have resistance, since they finish in the butter pan and turn to mush if boiled to full tenderness first.
Carrots were kitchen-garden filler in the nineteenth century and cookbooks worked hard to dignify them, which is why a single page can offer them fritter-fried, stewed in broth and finished maître d'hôtel — three registers of formality from the plain to the near-French. The fritter itself belongs to a long line of vegetable purée fritters, cousin to the potato croquette that was everywhere in hotel cookery of the 1890s. "Housekeeper's style" (ménagère) and "maître d'hôtel" were both stock menu terms of the period rather than invented dishes: the first signalled a homely stew, the second meant butter, parsley and lemon, the standard finish attached to everything from steak to boiled potatoes. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf from 1893, compiled his 1896 book largely as a working reference in this compressed style, assuming a reader who already knew what espagnole was and needed only a reminder of proportions.