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Carrots and Peas in Croustades
Prepare four croustades (for receipt, see below).
Combine any left-over cooked carrots and peas, cutting the carrots into dice. Add seasoning if necessary, and mix with white sauce No. 2 (see page 68). Heat and serve in hot croustades.
A two-line assembly recipe that assumes you already have the two cross-referenced components. Both are easy to supply.
- White sauce No. 2In many books of this era the numbered white sauces run from thin to thick, so No. 2 is probably the medium binding sauce; the actual proportions are on page 68 and should be taken from there rather than guessed at. For a filling that sits in a bread case you want it on the thick side so it does not soak through.
- CroustadesThese are cases, not a baked casserole: crustless bread cut into thick blocks, hollowed out, then brushed with butter and baked until crisp and gold, or fried in deep fat. The book supplies its own receipt below. Puff pastry shells or small dinner rolls hollowed out work equally well.
- QuantityFour croustades take roughly 2 cups of mixed vegetables and about 1 cup of sauce. Serve two per person as a light supper dish, one as a first course or a plate garnish.
- Cutting to matchDice the carrots to the size of the peas. The whole point of the dish visually is two colours of the same small unit; ragged chunks read as leftovers, which is what the book is trying to disguise.
- Reheating cooked vegetablesAlready-cooked carrots and peas need only to be warmed through in the finished sauce, two or three minutes over low heat. Boiling them again turns the peas grey and the carrots to mush.
- Seasoning"Add seasoning if necessary" is doing real work here, since vegetables cooked the day before and chilled taste flat. Salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg and a squeeze of lemon at the end will bring the sauce back.
- Timing the assemblyFill the cases at the moment of serving. A croustade held with wet filling in it for even ten minutes goes soft at the base.
- Food safety on the leftoversCooked vegetables that have been left out of refrigeration should not be used. Keep them chilled and use within three or four days.
Books of left-overs were a small publishing genre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aimed at households where a cook had to answer for waste but a plate still had to look composed. The croustade is the classic device for that: a fried or baked bread case, generally traced to the same root as crust by way of French croustade (compare Italian crostata), which turns a cupful of yesterday's vegetables in sauce into something that can be sent to table as a course in its own right. Numbered white sauces of this kind are associated with the systematic teaching of the cooking-school movement, where one master sauce learned in thin, medium and thick versions was expected to underpin dozens of dishes rather than each recipe repeating its own.