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Carrots for Garnish
Blanch some young carrots in boiling water, rub off their skins and trim them with a knife in equalized pear shapes; then drain and put them into a saucepan with some chicken consomme, add some salt, pepper and sugar and boil till they are done. Reduce the liquor so as to glaze the carrots, and serve.
A classic glazed-carrot garnish, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen that assumed a stockpot always on the stove. The technique still works exactly as described.
- Blanching to peelThe instruction to blanch and rub off the skins assumes genuinely young carrots with tender skins, a minute or two in boiling water loosens them. Supermarket carrots are older and thicker-skinned; peel them with a vegetable peeler and skip the blanch, since the consomme cooking does the rest.
- "Pear shapes"Turning work: trimming each piece to a smooth shape of roughly equal size, so the garnish cooks evenly and looks uniform on the plate. Pear is one of the classical forms; the more familiar tourne is a seven-sided barrel. A small paring knife or a proper turning knife is the tool. Expect to lose a good deal of the carrot to trim, save the scraps for stock.
- Chicken consommeAny good unsalted chicken stock stands in. Consomme is clarified stock and would usually carry some seasoning already, and the recipe still calls for added salt, so if you use a salted commercial stock, hold back on the salt until the liquid has reduced or the glaze will be brutally salty.
- Liquid levelNo quantity is given. Use just enough stock to come about level with the carrots, roughly a cup for a pound of trimmed pieces. Too much and you will boil them to mush before the liquid reduces.
- SugarA teaspoon or so per pound is plenty. Its job is body and gloss in the reduction, not sweetness, the carrots supply that.
- The glazeThis is the hinge. Cook uncovered so the stock reduces as the carrots soften, and finish over higher heat, rolling the pan, until only a syrupy film clings to them. If they are tender before the liquid is nearly gone, lift them out, reduce the liquor hard, then return them to coat. A knob of butter swirled in at the end is a common addition and gives a better shine, though the recipe does not call for it.
- TimingFifteen to twenty minutes at a gentle boil for pieces the size of a walnut. They should yield to a knife tip but keep their shape, a garnish that collapses is no garnish.
- YieldA pound of carrots trimmed this way garnishes six to eight plates. The recipe is a component, not a side dish, though it serves perfectly well as one.
Glazed turned carrots belong to the vocabulary of the classical French garnish, the small, precisely cut vegetables that dressed a roast or a joint and signalled that a proper brigade stood behind the plate. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maitre d'hotel, published his book in 1896, and entries like this one are often read as reminders for cooks who already knew the method rather than instructions for the household. The pear shape is one of several standard tourne forms; the point of cutting every piece alike was uniform cooking as much as appearance. Cooking a vegetable in seasoned stock and then reducing that stock to a coating film, rather than boiling in water and buttering afterward, is the same principle behind a modern glazed carrot or braised turnip, and it survives essentially unchanged.