(serves 4-6): 700 g carrots, 2 large potatoes, 20 g butter, 2 bay leaves, 1 l beef, veal or chicken stock, 2 tbsp lemon juice, salt, black pepper, 1/2 tsp sugar, cayenne pepper; 2 tbsp butter (toasted white bread cubes, frankfurter sausages).
Clean the carrots, peel the potatoes, cut into small cubes; wash the potato cubes in addition. Heat the butter and sauté the carrot cubes in it, but do not brown them at all. Salt lightly. Add the stock, bay leaves and potato cubes and cook everything covered on low heat until soft, which takes about 20 minutes. Then remove the bay leaves and puree the mixture in a blender or with a hand blender. Season to taste with salt, sugar and freshly ground pepper. Cover and let it steep for about 10 minutes, but do not let it boil. Add the butter. Finally, season with cayenne pepper. If you like, enrich the carrot cream with cubes of white bread toasted in butter, or serve frankfurters with it.
Halwar Gadschar, Turkish carrot dessert
600 g carrots, 3/4 l milk, 60 g butter, 1 tsp cardamom, 40 g sugar, 2 tbsp raisins, 2 tbsp honey, 1 piece cinnamon, 2 tbsp chopped almonds
Wash, scrape and puree the carrots. Cover the puree with milk, heat the remaining milk in a high saucepan, add the carrot puree and simmer with the remaining ingredients (except the almonds) on a low heat for an hour and a half. Leave to cool and serve sprinkled with the almonds.
With Waldemar Thomas at Mohrrüben-Schuch
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The home of our well-behaved, supposedly original German carrot (carrots are carrots with a roundish shape) is - Afghanistan, who would have thought? However, it has been with us since the 9th century, thanks to Charlemagne, who ordered the cultivation of yellow turnips on his domains. Although the beneficial health effects of eating carrots were known as early as the Renaissance, virtually no breeding efforts were made to develop them over long periods of time.
As we know them today: bright orange and thoroughly tender and juicy, carrots have only been around since the 19th century. Before that, they may have been much woodier and paler in appearance, as the name "yellow turnips" still in use today suggests. What the carrots gained in juiciness and colour in the course of their breeding changes, the roots will, it is assumed, have lost in their formerly strong flavour. In eastern Poland, he said, he had eaten carrots, and while they had not won any beauty contests, they tasted wonderful - just like they used to, a friend recently told me.
Carrots contain carotene, the raw material for vitamin A, without which humans have poor vision in the semi-dark. But an improvement in general visual acuity cannot be achieved by eating large quantities of carrots; that would be too easy. There are, taste reduction or not, thankfully enough culinary reasons to bring carrots on the table every now and then. Or carrots. Because carrots are on the rise again, which makes gardener Schuch happy, since the smaller, roundish roots are much more delicious than their pointed, slender sisters. Whereby slender is to be understood relatively, because carrots (like carrots) become almost endlessly large and thick, one gives the young plants only sufficient place for developing when separating. The Schuchs are convinced that the rather heavy soils of the Rhine-Main area produce better tasting yellow turnips than the light (and nutrient-poor) sandy soil. How much better the soil in eastern Poland must be! But it's a long way there, and so we have no choice but to give the carrots a taste. In the gentle carrot cream soup, butter and a hint of cayenne pepper take care of that.
Few other vegetables, however, contain as much sugar as carrots, and so it is not surprising that carrot desserts play no small role in the kitchens of many peoples. In the form of Rübli tarts in Switzerland and Austria no less than in the Turkish cuisine Halwar Gadschar, a distinctive, only slightly sweet puree, to which cardamom, raisins, honey, cinnamon and almonds give zing. It tastes good even without the silver leaf of the original version, which Turkish cuisine once adopted from India.
Horticulture Anneliese and Hans-Ludwig Schuch
Am Riedsteg 125
60437 Frankfurt-Nieder-Erlenbach
Phone: 06101-54580
Fax: 06101-545822
Email: hl@schuch-gaertnerei.com
Internet: www.schuch-gaertnerei.com
Opening Hours: Sale ex nursery: Mon-Sat 8-12 u. 14-19 clock. Sat: Bauernmarkt Bad Vilbel (March-December).
from Waldemar Thomas