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New Carrots, Maitre D'Hotel
Trim off stems, neatly scrape and thoroughly wash twenty-four medium, new carrots. Cut in halves lengthwise. Place in a small saucepan with two branches parsley, one medium white onion with one clove stuck in, half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon sugar, two saltspoons white pepper, a half ounce butter and half pint water. Cover pan, let boil five minutes, then set in oven thirty-five minutes. Remove, take up the parsley and onion, then let reduce on range until nearly dry. Squeeze in juice of half a sound lemon, add one ounce butter and half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley; toss well, dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A classic glazed carrot: the vegetables cook in a small amount of seasoned liquid that is then boiled down to a syrupy film, and finished with butter, lemon and parsley. The hinge is the reduction — stop while a glossy glaze still clings to the carrots, not after the pan has gone dry and the sugar begins to catch.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon. That is a lot of pepper for a vegetable dish by current taste; a quarter teaspoon is plenty.
- Half pint of waterOne cup. It should come roughly halfway up the carrots in a snug pan — the aim is a braise, not a boil, so the liquid reduces to a glaze in about the time the carrots need.
- Butter weightsHalf an ounce is one tablespoon for the braise; one ounce is two tablespoons for the finish. The second addition goes in off the heat or over very low heat so it emulsifies with the syrup rather than splitting.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits the thirty-five minutes stated; check at twenty-five, since modern carrots vary and new carrots cook quickly.
- Pan and lidUse an ovenproof saucepan or a small braising pan with a tight lid. If your lid is loose, a round of parchment pressed onto the surface under the lid keeps the liquid from vanishing in the oven.
- New carrotsGenuinely young carrots, thin and sweet; the sugar here is only half a teaspoon, which suits carrots already sweet in themselves. Full-size supermarket carrots will need to be cut into even batons and may want a slightly longer braise.
- Onion cloutéOnion clouté clove flavours the liquid and is discarded. The recipe calls for a single clove, and clove is assertive enough that more would likely dominate.
- Maitre d'hotelThe name refers to the finish of butter, chopped parsley and lemon juice, added at the last moment. Add the lemon after the reduction, not before, or the acidity cooks off and the brightness is lost.
- YieldTwenty-four medium new carrots serve six as a side dish. Serve immediately; the glaze dulls and the parsley darkens as the dish stands.
The tag maître d'hôtel is one of the workhorse terms of nineteenth-century French professional cookery, with a fixed meaning in any hotel kitchen: butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, either kneaded cold into a pat and laid on grilled meat or fish, or stirred into a pan at the end as it is here. The name is often said to refer to the dining-room steward of a grand house — the dish the maître d'hôtel could, by that account, finish himself in front of the guests, without a saucier — though this explanation is traditional rather than documented. The carrots themselves show the standard French treatment of a young root vegetable: a short braise in barely enough seasoned liquid, a bouquet of parsley and a clove-stuck onion for background, a pinch of sugar to underline the vegetable's own sweetness, then reduction to a glaze.