No. 709

Puree of Carrots

Puree de Carottes

Made with two pounds of the red part of minced carrots; blanch and then finish cooking them in four ounces of butter without browning; moisten with a quart of veloute stock (No. 422), season with salt and a little sugar, and let cook slowly until the carrots are tender, and the broth reduced. In case they should not be sufficiently moistened, add a little more beef stock (No. 194a), then pound the whole in a mortar; press them through a sieve, and return this puree to the saucepan with a pint of thick bechamel (No. 409); stir briskly, and just when ready to serve, add two ounces of fine butter.

← No. 708 Puree of Milan or Savoy Cabbage Garnishings No. 710 Puree of Cauliflower or Sea-Kale →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French vegetable purée built as a garnish rather than a side dish, and thickened with two sauces rather than starch. Nothing here is difficult, but the cross-references hide most of the work.

The "red part" of the carrotIn period usage this normally means the outer flesh rather than the paler, more fibrous core. With modern carrots you can use the whole root, though trimming out any woody centre from large ones still gives a smoother purée.
Velouté stock, No. 422Not a stock in the modern sense but a velouté sauce: white roux moistened with veal or chicken stock and simmered until it coats. A quart of a light, well-flavoured velouté is what the carrots cook in, so a thin, under-reduced version will leave the purée loose.
Béchamel, No. 409A pint of Ranhofer's thick béchamel, which is a heavy white sauce simmered down and often enriched with cream. Modern béchamel made at pouring consistency will slacken the finished purée; cook it to the thickness of soft mashed potato before adding.
Blanch, then sweatBlanching in salted water first, then finishing the drained carrots gently in the butter without colour, is the hinge of the flavour. Any browning turns the purée muddy rather than sweet, so keep the heat low and cover the pan.
Mortar and sieveA food processor or blender replaces the mortar entirely. Still pass the result through a fine sieve or drum sieve afterwards; the fibre that a blade leaves behind is exactly what the original sieving removed.
Finishing butterThe two ounces of fine butter stirred in at the last moment is the classic monter au beurre. Add it off the heat, in pieces, and do not let the purée boil afterwards or the emulsion breaks and the surface turns greasy.
SeasoningThe recipe calls for salt "and a little sugar"; sugar with carrots is a standing convention in French cookery of the period, and older varieties may have been less sweet than modern ones. Taste before adding any; a teaspoon is usually enough, and often none is wanted.
Yield and useTwo pounds of carrots plus the sauces gives roughly six cups, which in this book's terms garnishes a large joint or fills tartlets, timbales and croustades. As a modern side dish it serves eight to ten.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its structure explains the shape of this entry: the book is a system of numbered cross-references, so a purée is not a standalone dish but a component to be called on by the recipes for garnished joints, entrées and moulded vegetable timbales. The vegetable purée bound with velouté and béchamel rather than potato or cream is squarely in the tradition Carême codified and Escoffier later pruned, in which nearly every garnish passes through one of the mother sauces. The word purée itself is older than the technique described here, generally traced to Old French purer, to strain or purify, and the mortar-and-sieve method in this recipe reflects that sense: before mechanical mills, smoothness came from pounding and then forcing the pulp through a hair sieve, or tamis.