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Mashed Carrots
Scrape and wash some carrots, cut them in quarters lengthwise and boil till tender in broth. When they are done, strain, pass them through a sieve and season with pepper and salt, and add a lump of butter. Fill some cups or moulds with the pulp, press it down tightly and then turn them out. This is a very tasty form of serving carrots.
Carrots, Poulette Style Wash and scrape the required number of carrots, place them in a bowl of boiling water to scald. Take them out, drain, slice, put them into a saucepan of boiling water with a bit of butter in it, and boil until they are done and quite tender. Put a little flour and butter into a fryingpan, cook for a few minutes, sprinkle in salt and pepper to taste, and add a little lemon juice, the yolks of two eggs and some rich stock. Then place the carrots in it and toss them over the fire so as to cook without boiling. Turn the whole out onto a dish, and serve.
Carrots Stewed in Sugar and Cream Scrape and clean six or eight large, sound carrots, put them into a saucepan of water and boil until they are done and nearly all the water is absorbed or evaporated. Mash the carrots, pour in a little milk and one tablespoonful of potato flour, a few dried orange flowers and a very little sifted crushed loaf-sugar; stir in a sufficient number of eggs to thicken, using three yolks to two whites, and whipping them well with warmed butter. Heat the mixture in the oven until it is of the required consistence, then turn it out onto a dish, and serve very hot with powdered sugar sprinkled over.
Three carrot preparations run together under one heading, in the compressed style Oscar used throughout the vegetable chapters. The first is a moulded purée, the second a classic poulette (egg-and-lemon liaison), the third closer to a sweet baked pudding.
- The hinge: never boil the pouletteOnce the two yolks go into the pan, the sauce holds only below a simmer — the instruction to "toss them over the fire so as to cook without boiling" is the whole technique. Take the pan off the heat while you stir the yolks in, then return it to low heat and stop the moment the sauce coats a spoon.
- Boiling in brothFor the mashed carrots, use enough stock to cover and keep it at a bare simmer; 20–30 minutes for quartered carrots, depending on age. The strained broth is worth saving. Salt lightly at the start, as reduction will concentrate it.
- Passing through a sieveA drum sieve or food mill gives the dry, fine texture that will hold a mould shape. A food processor makes carrots wet and slack, and the turned-out cups will slump.
- Moulding and yieldOrdinary teacups, ramekins or dariole moulds all work; butter them lightly and press the pulp in hot so it sets as it cools slightly. The recipe gives no quantity; as a rough guide, six large carrots will fill about four moulds, enough for four as a garnish alongside a roast.
- The scalding step is optionalThe recipe drops the carrots into boiling water before slicing; the reason is not given. In practice it does little that a modern scrub and peel does not, and can be skipped.
- Potato flourThis is potato starch, not potato flour as sold in gluten-free baking aisles today. One tablespoon thickens a purée of six to eight carrots; cornstarch substitutes directly.
- Dried orange flowersDried bitter-orange blossom was a standard confectioner's flavouring and is now hard to find outside Middle Eastern grocers. A teaspoon of orange flower water, added off the heat, gives the same perfume — it is potent, so start with less.
- Loaf sugarSugar came in hard cones or loaves that were broken and crushed at home. "Sifted crushed loaf-sugar" is simply fine granulated or caster sugar; "powdered sugar" for the top meant finely ground sugar, for which caster or modern confectioners' sugar will stand in.
- Heating the third dish in the ovenNo temperature and no oven description are given. Treat it as a custard: around 325–350F in a buttered dish until just set, roughly 25–35 minutes. Hotter and the eggs will curdle and weep.
- "A sufficient number of eggs"Genuinely unspecified. For six to eight mashed carrots, three yolks and two whites — the ratio Oscar gives — is one batch; that is about the right thickening for two cups of purée.
Oscar Tschirky's book gathers the vegetable repertoire of a large hotel kitchen working in the French manner, and these three carrot dishes show its range: a moulded purée for plating alongside roasts, a sauce poulette, and a sweetened baked preparation that sits between vegetable and dessert. Poulette is the standard French name for a velouté finished with egg yolk and lemon, used across the period for sweetbreads, mussels, tripe and vegetables alike; a folk explanation holds that the name comes from the pale, chicken-coloured look of the finished sauce rather than from any chicken in it. The sweet carrot dish belongs to an older tradition, one in which carrots were valued for sugar content in an age when refined sugar was expensive — carrot puddings and carrot tarts appear in English cookery books well before Oscar. Moulding purées in cups and turning them out was standard hotel garnish work, giving a plate the neat repeating shapes that dining rooms of the 1890s expected.