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New Carrots, Colbert
Scrape and thoroughly wash twenty-four even-sized new carrots; drain, place in a small saucepan with two gills water, one ounce butter. half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon sugar and two saltspoons white pepper, Gently roll them in the seasoning. Cover the pan, place it on the fire for five minutes, then set in the oven for fifty minutes. Remove (the juice must be nearly evaporated), add half gill hot demi-glace, the juice of half a lemon and half teaspoon of freshly chopped parsley; carefully mix without breaking, dress them with a skimmer on a vegetable dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
A braise, not a boil: the carrots cook in a covered pan until the liquid has almost gone, then are finished with a spoonful of sauce. The measurements are Escoffier-era and need translating before you start.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is 1 cup of water and half a gill is 1/4 cup of demi-glace. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, giving 1/4 teaspoon sugar and 1/2 teaspoon white pepper — a lot of pepper by modern taste, and worth halving.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven temperature or heat word of any kind. A moderate oven, around 350F, in a covered pan is a reasonable modern reading; the point is a slow braise, not colour.
- The fifty minutes is for a different carrot"New carrots" here means genuinely young roots pulled small, but even so, fifty minutes will collapse most supermarket carrots. Start checking at 25 minutes and judge by a knife tip and by the liquid, which should be reduced to a glaze.
- Twenty-four carrotsSmall whole carrots of even size; the recipe specifies only that they be new and evenly matched. Larger carrots cut to matching batons work, but they must all be the same thickness or they will not finish together.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole combined with brown stock and reduced by half — the standard restaurant base of the period. A few tablespoons of well-reduced brown stock or a good jarred demi-glace does the job; skip stock cubes, which will overwhelm the dish with salt.
- The hinge: evaporate before saucingIf any watery cooking liquid remains when the demi-glace goes in, the sauce will not cling and the dish turns soupy. Uncover and reduce on the stovetop for a minute or two if needed.
- Dress with a skimmerA slotted spoon. The carrots are lifted out whole and arranged, then the sauce is poured over, so they must be handled once and not stirred.
- YieldTwenty-four small carrots serves four to six as a side.
Anything called à la Colbert in a classical French kitchen carries the name of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, though the attachment of his name to these dishes came long after his death and is traditional rather than documented. In classical practice, Colbert meant a butter or glaze of meat sharpened with lemon and parsley — close to the finish given here to the carrots, and the same family of treatment applied to sole and to eggs. Its appearance in Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book reflects the author's years at Delmonico's in New York, where the French repertoire was the working language of the kitchen. The technique itself — braising roots in their own liquor with butter and a pinch of sugar until the moisture has gone — is the classic glazing method.