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Stewed Carrots
Take any quantity desired, divide the carrots lengthwise, and boil until perfectly tender, which will require from one to two hours. When done, have ready a sauce-pan with one or two table-spoons butter, and small cup cream; slice the carrots very thin, and put in. the sauce-pan; add salt and pepper, and let stew ten or fifteer minutes, stirring gently once or twice, and serve in a vegetable dish. Some add more milk or cream; when done, skim out carrots, and to the cream add a little flour thickening, or the beaten yolks of one or two eggs. When it boils, pour over the carrots and Carrots may also be boiled with meat like turnips or parsnips, but they take longer to cook than either. - Mrs. C. T. C. serve.
A straightforward creamed vegetable, but the boiling time belongs to another era of carrots. Two points do most of the work: cut the cooking short, and keep the egg-thickened cream below a simmer.
- Boiling timeOne to two hours reflects mature, full-grown storage carrots, often woody by late winter. Modern carrots, halved lengthwise, are tender in 12-20 minutes; taste at ten and stop as soon as a knife slides through.
- Order of operationsThe recipe boils the halves whole and only then slices them thin. No reason is given, but the sequence is worth keeping as written rather than slicing first; less cut surface in the water is unlikely to hurt.
- The egg finishIf you use the yolk variation, do not follow "when it boils" literally. Temper the beaten yolks with a ladle of the hot cream, return them to the pan off the heat, and warm gently to about 175F. Boiling curdles them.
- Flour thickening"A little flour thickening" means flour slaked in cold milk or water to a smooth slurry, roughly a teaspoon per cup of cream. Whisk it in and let it cook two or three minutes to lose the raw taste.
- Small cupPeriod cup measures were not standardised: some books used the half-pint cup, others an ordinary teacup, which is smaller. Read "small cup" as roughly half a cup of cream, and add more if the pan looks dry.
- The final stewTen to fifteen minutes in the cream is for already-cooked carrots and is mainly about reduction and seasoning. Five is usually enough over low heat; longer and the slices break down.
- Yield"Any quantity desired" is no help: reckon 1 1/2 to 2 lb of carrots, 2 tablespoons butter and 1/2 cup cream to serve four.
Carrots in nineteenth-century American cookery were more often treated as a keeping vegetable than a delicacy — stored in sand or a root cellar and pulled out through the winter, by which time they were large, fibrous and genuinely in need of an hour in the pot. That explains both the long boil and the two cheaper finishes offered here, cream thickened with flour or with egg yolks, which are the same sauce logic applied to many boiled vegetables of the period. The closing note that carrots may be boiled with meat "like turnips or parsnips" places the dish in the older one-pot tradition, where root vegetables went into the boiled dinner alongside salt beef or pork.