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Fowl, Duck, Game, Hare: Carrots
No. 167. Carote al sughillo (Carrots) Ingredients: Carrots, stock, salt, butter, sausage, pepper.
Boil some young carrots in stock, slice them up, and put them in a stewpan with a sausage cut up; cook for quarter of an hour on a slow fire, then stir up the fire, and when the carrots and sausage are a good colour add a good Espagnole sauce (No. 1), and serve.
No. 168. Carote e piselli alla panna (Carrots and Peas) Ingredients: Young carrots, peas, cream, salt.
Half cook equal quantities of peas and young carrots (the carrots should be cut in dice, and will require a little longer cooking), then put them together in a stewpan with three or four tablespoonsful of cream, and cook till quite tender. Serve hot.
No. 169. Verze alla Certosina (Cabbage) Ingredients:
Cabbage, butter, salt, leeks or shallots, sardines, cheese. be Any vegetable may cooked in the following simple manner: - Boil them well, then slightly fry a little bit of leek or shallot and a sardine in butter; drain the vegetables, put them in the butter, and cook gently so that they may absorb all the flavour, and at the last add a dust of grated cheese and a tiny pinch of spice.
Three vegetable dishes given in the Italian manner, with quantities left entirely to the cook. Read them as ratios and methods rather than as fixed formulas.
- Espagnole is the hinge of No. 167Without it the dish is just carrots and sausage. Espagnole is a brown stock sauce thickened with a dark roux and simmered long with mirepoix and tomato; a good jarred demi-glace or a reduced brown stock lightly thickened will stand in. Add it at the end, off a fierce fire, and only enough to coat.
- The sausageProbably an Italian fresh sausage (salsiccia), coarse pork with fennel or black pepper, rather than a cured salami or a British breakfast sausage; the recipe says only 'sausage'. Skin it and cut it into rounds or crumble it; it goes in raw, so give it the full quarter hour on low heat before raising the flame to colour it.
- "Stir up the fire"On a range this means moving the pan to high heat at the end to brown the carrots and sausage; the recipe sets no time for it, only 'when the carrots and sausage are a good colour'. Do not add the sauce until the browning has happened.
- Boiling carrots in stockYoung carrots need 8-12 minutes in simmering stock depending on thickness, then they are sliced and cooked again, so stop them while still firm. Save the stock; it is worth reducing into the sauce.
- Proportions for No. 168Equal quantities by volume of diced carrot and shelled peas works out at roughly 8 oz of each for four people, with 3-4 tablespoons of cream. Frozen peas need only two or three minutes, so give the carrot a five-minute head start rather than half-cooking both.
- Cream will not thicken muchThree or four tablespoons over a pound of vegetables gives a light glaze, not a sauce. If it looks thin at the end, lift the lid and let it reduce for a minute; do not add flour.
- The sardine in No. 169An oil-packed sardine or two anchovy fillets, mashed into the butter until they dissolve, which is the point of them. Used this way they read as savoury depth rather than fish. Salt lightly at the end, since sardine and grated cheese both bring their own.
- "A tiny pinch of spice"The book does not say which spice. Nutmeg is the usual reading for a finish of this kind, though a mixed pepper-clove-cinnamon blend is also possible.
- Cabbage timing"Boil them well" is period shorthand that can easily produce grey cabbage. Six to eight minutes for shredded green or Savoy cabbage, drained hard, is enough; it finishes in the butter.
- FilingThese three are vegetable dishes despite appearing under the fowl and game heading in this section of the book. Treat them as accompaniments; no quantities are given, so the yield is a matter of judgement.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was assembled by Mrs W. G. Waters as a frame-tale of ten diners exchanging Italian recipes, and these three entries show the book's habit of recording method without measurement, the way a cook dictates to another cook rather than to a beginner. Verze alla Certosina carries the name of the Carthusians, whose rule excludes meat: dishes labelled alla certosina in Italian cookery are traditionally said to take their name from monastic kitchens that reached for fish, in this case a sardine, where others would have used bacon or ham for savour. The cream-and-butter finishes and the Espagnole in No. 167 mark the book as a product of the period when French sauce work had become the assumed grammar of any respectable kitchen, even one presenting itself as resolutely Italian.