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Carrots and Asparagus
(Alsace-Lorraine.) Peel, and slice the carrots into small squares, add as much asparagus; also cooked, cut into the same-sized pieces, using only the best part. Cover with white stock or milk, and heat well together. If milk is used, add flour, butter, yolk of an egg, and parsley.
HARICOT BEANS (as cooked in Burgundy.).
Burgundy being the province where wine is plentiful because of the vineyards, everything there is cooked in it. Soak 1/2 pound of red beans overnight. Drain them, add 1 ounce of butter, an onion, cut fine, 1 clove, some parsley and thyme, and enough consomme to cover. Boil slowly until tender but dry. Take out the herbs, add salt and pepper, and 1/2 cup of red wine. Serve hot, as a separate course.
Two short vegetable dishes run together on one page, both written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew the basics. The carrot and asparagus dish is essentially a warm vegetable ragout finished either with stock or with a milk-and-egg liaison; the beans are a slow braise.
- Cook the carrots firstThe text says the asparagus is "also cooked," which tells you both vegetables are meant to go into the pan already tender. Dice the carrots small and boil or steam them until just soft, and use only asparagus tips and the tender upper stalk, cut to match.
- White stockA pale, unbrowned stock made from veal or chicken bones and aromatics with no roasting step. Any light chicken stock stands in; avoid a dark brown stock, which will muddy the colour of the dish.
- The egg yolk is the hingeIf you take the milk route, temper the yolk with a ladle of the hot liquid before it goes into the pan, and keep the pan below a simmer afterwards. Boiling after the yolk goes in will curdle the sauce into grains.
- Unstated quantities for the milk versionNo amounts are given for the flour, butter or parsley. For roughly a pound of mixed vegetables, a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, a cup of milk, one yolk and a spoonful of chopped parsley is in proportion.
- "Haricot beans" but redThe heading says haricot, the method says red beans. Dried kidney or borlotti beans are the closest supermarket equivalent. Half a pound dry gives about three cups cooked, enough for four.
- Boil dried red beans properlyKidney-type beans contain lectins that require a full rolling boil for at least ten minutes before the heat is dropped to a simmer. An overnight soak alone, followed by a bare slow simmer, is not sufficient.
- ConsommeMeaning clarified broth, here presumably beef. Ordinary unsalted beef stock works; salt only at the end, as the recipe directs.
- "Tender but dry"The beans should absorb nearly all the liquid, so keep the lid ajar for the last stretch and top up with hot stock only if they threaten to catch. Expect an hour to an hour and a half of simmering after the initial boil.
- The wine goes in lastHalf a cup of red wine stirred into hot, nearly dry beans will taste raw unless you let it bubble two or three minutes to cook off the alcohol edge. Use something dry and light-bodied.
Both dishes come from a book of the sort that flourished around 1900, when middle-class households were curious about continental cooking and cookery writers obliged with regional roundups. The framing is as much geography lesson as instruction: Alsace-Lorraine, then under German rule after 1871 and a subject of intense French sentiment, was a fashionable label to attach to a dish, and the note that Burgundy cooks everything in wine because the vineyards are there is the kind of tidy provincial generalisation such books traded in. The beans borrow the familiar Burgundian idiom: aromatics, a clove, a bouquet of parsley and thyme, long slow cooking, red wine. Serving vegetables as a separate course, as the recipe directs, was standard French practice and something Anglophone writers of the period were often at pains to point out to their readers.