The Guardian and Guardian Unlimited hold an annual sleaze raffle of the gifts and freebies given to hacks in the course of the year, in aid of whatever charity is to benefit from our Christmas appeal. I always buy tickets, and put some freebies into the prize haul: this year I won four books, including Londoner's Larder: English Cuisine from Chaucer to the Present, and Monty Don's My Roots.
I started to peruse the former on the train on the way home tonight and it looks very promising. One fact mentioned in passing caught my attention, though: in the preamble to a recipe for a Victorian dish called Kalecannon, the author Annette Hope writes:
Victorian recipe books always insist on carrots being boiled for at least an hour, although the timings for other vegetables are not very different from modern ones. Were the carrots a different variety?
From my knowledge of heritage varieties, I know there are strains still being grown today that were around in Victorian times, so I don't think it can be that. Maybe they boiled them whole? Or simply liked their carrots very mushy ...
A good carrot site is the following - with everything you ever wanted to know about carrots
http://website.lineone.net/~stolarczyk/
Posted by: Patrick Vickery | December 23, 2005 at 08:33 PM