Caramel Carrots: or, Serve as a vegetable or a dessert

Autumn is here, and the carrots have struck again!

Caramel Carrots 8 medium-sized carrots, scrubbed 1½ cups sugar ½ cup butter ½ tsp salt 1 tsp nutmeg 1 tsp cinnamon ¾ cups water (saved from the cooking water if you boil the carrots) Scrub off the outer layer of the carrots. Slice them. Cook the carrots until tender, either in the microwave (place them in a loosely covered bowl with two or three spoonfuls of water) or by boiling them. Drain the carrots if you boiled them. Mix with all remaining ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to medium and cook until syrup is thick. Mrs. Walter Newberry, Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

I was recently asked to make a pumpkin pie. Naturally, I served a carrot pie instead. (No one knew the difference.) Unfortunately, this left me with the remainder of a two-pound bag of carrots. Fortunately, the Fort Worth Woman's Club has an easy way to get rid of them: slice them and boil them in syrup. In theory, they will become little discs of orange candy. 

This cookbook comes from 1928, which puts it barely before the rise of bizarre 1950s salads. Nevertheless, we can see the early whisperings of future recipes that end with notes like "serve as a salad or dessert."

At first, I was going to microwave the carrots instead of boiling them as specified, figuring that Mrs. Walter Newberry would have done the same had microwaves been invented at the time. But the recipe directs us to save some of the cooking water for the upcoming syrup-making. I thought that perhaps we need to extract some of the carrot flavor in order to ensure the correct final result. As you can see from the barely-tinted color of the water we so carefully saved, that was pointless.

Having cooked the carrots, we are next directed to dump more sugar onto them than I used to put on my cornflakes when I was too carefree to worry about things like "nutrition" and "empty calories."

At first I wondered if the puny allotment of water we saved would suffice. It barely made a puddle in the bottom of the pot. But as soon as I stirred in the sugar, our syrup began to grow. Water seemed to come out of nowhere. This pot of carrots was nearly dry before I stirred in the sugar. After only thirty seconds (and before I had turned on the burner), it looked like this:

By the time the first simmering bubbles appeared, we had so much syrup that you'd think I never drained the carrots in the first place. It turns out that sugar is so hygroscopic (a word we learned while making a previous cake) that it sucks the juice right out of carrots.

Our simmering caramel carrots smelled like dessert and looked like the beginning of a vegetable soup.

I served the caramel carrots with a very heavy meat and sauerkraut stew, and they were an oddly perfect side dish. Maybe those people who serve desserts as a "salad" are on to something.

I'm not surprised that the caramel carrots tasted good. We've already learned that you can use carrots instead of pumpkin for all your pie needs, and this recipe is basically one blender and a couple of eggs away from becoming pie filling. But I didn't expect it to go so well with the rest of supper.

I must also note that the caramel carrots left us with a lot of leftover caramel syrup. I won't need to worry about what to put on toast for quite some time.

In closing, I am going to file the caramel carrots under "a lot better than I expected." Who would have thought that half-candied carrots would be good? I would say I'll make them again since they're fast, easy, and taste good. But I have reservations about putting so much sugar into the vegetables. However, the holiday season is mercilessly approaching, along with it a massive disregard for things like "nutrition" and "draining away the excess fat." With that in mind, caramel carrots would be perfect next to everything else that is good and buttery.