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Carrots with Fine Herbs
Wash and scrape about three large carrots, cut them into thick slices, put them into a saucepan with a lump of salt and plenty of cold water, and boil until they are tender. Put a small lump of butter into a saucepan, place it over the fire until it is browned. Pour a pint of water, or clear broth, over the onion and boil it for five minutes. Drain the carrots and put them in with the onion, add about one dessert-spoonful of chopped parsley, and boil for three or four minutes longer. Remove the carrots from the fire, squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Turn the stew onto a hot dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread, and serve.
A simple braise, but the text as printed has a gap: an onion appears in the third sentence without ever having been introduced. Assume one medium onion, sliced or chopped, browned in the butter.
- The missing onionMelt the butter, then cook one medium onion in it until well browned before adding the liquid. Without this step the dish has no depth and the instruction to "pour a pint of water over the onion" makes no sense.
- "Fine herbs"The title promises fines herbes, which classically means parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon in roughly equal parts. The recipe itself uses parsley alone; a mix of the four, added at the end, delivers what the name advertises.
- MeasuresA dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons. The book being American, the pint is presumably the US pint, 2 cups. "A lump of butter" is roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons; "a lump of salt" simply means a good pinch in the cooking water.
- Browning the butterButter browns fast and then burns. Keep the heat moderate and watch for the nutty smell, and have the onion ready to go in the moment the milk solids color.
- Don't overboil the carrotsThick slices boiled to tender, then simmered another four minutes in the broth, will be soft to the point of collapse. Boil them just short of tender so they finish in the sauce.
- The lemon lastThe lemon goes in off the heat, as written. Acid held at a boil loses its lift and can dull the green of the parsley; added at the end it sets off the butter and the sweetness of the carrot.
- Broth over waterClear broth is the better of the two options given; a light chicken or veal stock gives the pint some body, though the short cooking time here leaves little scope for reduction.
- YieldThree large carrots serve two to three as a side. The fried bread croutons are called a garnish, and they will also take up some of the liquid on the plate.
Fines herbes is one of the small fixed formulas of nineteenth-century French cooking, and the phrase is used in Oscar's book as shorthand for a plain vegetable or omelette given a green, aromatic finish rather than a sauce. Oscar's Cook Book (1896) appeared a few years into Oscar Tschirky's tenure as maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, and it mixes elaborate hotel service dishes with modest household preparations like this one; the unintroduced onion looks like a slip in the printed text.<br><br>Carrots were a cheap, long-keeping root in the American market of the period, often stored in sand through the winter, and they appear frequently in books of this era as a vegetable course dressed with butter, herbs and croutons.