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Creamed Vegetables
Prepare white sauce. Add two and a half cups diced, cooked beans, diced carrots, turnips, celery, radishes, small whole onions, string beans or cauliflower. If beets are used, add a trace of lemon juice.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century household manuals, which assumed the cook already had a white sauce formula memorised. The proportions below fill in what the original leaves out.
- The white sauce is unspecifiedFor 2 1/2 cups of vegetables, make a medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, with salt and white pepper. A thin sauce will pool at the bottom of the dish; a thick one will paste the vegetables together.
- Cook the roux before the milk goes inLet the butter and flour bubble together a minute or two over low heat before adding milk. Raw flour is a common fault in a creamed dish and later simmering does not entirely hide it.
- Vegetables must be cooked and drained firstThe sauce does no cooking here. Boil or steam each vegetable separately to just-tender, since carrots and turnips take far longer than string beans or cauliflower, then drain well. Wet vegetables thin the sauce as they sit.
- The beet instruction is about colour, not flavourA trace of lemon juice helps beet pigment hold its red rather than shifting dull blue-purple in a near-neutral milk sauce. Add it to the beets themselves, or stir it in off the heat at the very end, as acid dropped into hot milk may curdle the sauce.
- Beets separately, if at allEven acidulated, beets will bleed into a white sauce within minutes. Cream them on their own rather than mixing them with pale vegetables unless the pink is wanted.
- Radishes are meant cookedCooked radishes lose their bite and turn mild and slightly sweet, closer to a young turnip. This is not a raw garnish; simmer them until a knife goes in easily.
- YieldAbout four servings as a side dish. Reheat gently over low heat or in a water bath; a direct high flame will break the sauce.
Creamed vegetables belong to the era when a competent white sauce was considered the foundation of plain American cooking, taught in the cookery schools that spread from the 1870s onward and reproduced in many household manuals thereafter. The formula's usefulness was that it made leftovers presentable: yesterday's boiled carrots, turnips or beans, bound in sauce and reheated, became a dinner dish rather than scraps. The long list of interchangeable vegetables here, radishes included, suits a kitchen working from the garden and the root cellar rather than from a market with year-round choice. The lemon-and-beet note is the kind of practical chemistry these books passed along without explanation, and it holds up in outline: beet pigments shift colour with pH, holding red in acid and going drab as the surroundings approach neutral, as in a milk sauce.