[Sca-cooks] carrot cake

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

I wrote, with multiple snips:

>CARROT PASTE

>MY VERSION
>
>5 lb. carrots

>1. Cook carrots in just enough water to cover.


Erk! I forgot to mention what i did to the carrots before i put them
in the pan...

I washed them, cut off the tops, then pared the outer skin off. Then
i cut off the thinnest parts and put them in the pan. Then i sliced
the rest of them lengthwise in half. If they were very large i cut
them further lengthwise. If they were really long i cut them
horizontally. I didn't have little carrot sticks, but i did have long
carrot quarters and eighths. Note that i was using rather long and
large carrots. Obviously you need to adjust what you do with yours to
their size.

I did not remove the core because it seems to me that in modern
carrots the core is not as woody as it sounds like it was in the time
the Andalusian cookbook was written, when a number of other
Andalusian recipes call for removing the woody center then cooking
the carrots separately from the rest of the dish, adding them near
the end of cooking.

At first i thought it was so the carrots wouldn't over cook, but once
when i was lazy i put them in shortly after the chicken in the White
Tharida, and they still had plenty of consistency. Perhaps they were
more bitter, and cooking separately kept them from making the dish
taste bad? Whatever, i am now convinced that modern carrots have a
different texture, and probably a different flavor, than 13th c.
Andalusian carrots, even if I don't exactly how.

Anahita