INGREDIENT OF THE MONTH: CARROTS
Carrots treated with due reverence in Fred’s incredible carrot quiche.
Our true appreciation of carrots was awakened by reading Jane Grigson’s ‘English Food’. Grigson features an extract from Richard Gardiner’s ‘Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing and Planting of Kitchin [sic] Gardens’, first published in 1599, which reframed how we think of this seemingly humble and mundane vegetable.
Gardiner celebrated the virtues of carrots (and other everyday vegetables like cabbage) for providing an abundant, healthful and stable crop for the poor of Early Modern England, particularly at times when bread and other foods were scarce.
His panegyric concludes:
Carrots well boiled and buttered is a good dish for hungry or good stomachs. Carrots in necessity and dearth, are eaten of the poor people, after they be boiled, instead of bread and meat. Many people will eat carrots raw, and do digest well in hungry stomachs: they give good nourishment to all people, and not hurtful to any, whatsoever infirmities they be diseased of, as by experience doth prove many to be true. Carrots are good to be eaten with salt fish. Therefore sow carrots in your gardens, and humbly praise God for them, as for a singular and great blessing.
We found this to be an incredibly moving reminder of the blessings of the harvest and the gratitude we so often forget to feel for the staples of English cooking.
Carrots are celebrated in many forms here at ember - in delicious quiches, in birthday cakes, pureed, roasted, juiced and grated. We are currently working on a variation of a carrot tart which includes carrot pastry (made with carrot juice and rapeseed oil to retain the beautiful orange colour), home made goats’ curd, smoked carrot puree, pickled carrot gel, topped with smoked carrots and glazed with vegetable treacle.
We hope Richard Gardiner would approve.
Crisping up our beautiful carrot quiche
Adding the finishing touches to our little smoked carrot tarts.
