The ABCs of Everyday French Cuisine 3: C for carottes

(Flickr photo courtesy of Maxime LeDuc)

Carrots are a reliable vegetable. They keep well, are easy to cut up and please everybody in my family. I virtually always have them on hand and, as in American cooking, they are one of the staple vegetables of everyday French cuisine.

When I was a student in Tours in the 1980s, we frequently ate at a restaurant that served plain, home-style French food. We had a food allowance and could just afford the three-course evening meal, which, if my memory serves me correctly, cost 5 francs. (Is this possible?) One of their recurring starters was carottes râpées, and my fellow students and I all felt these grated carrots with a simple vinaigrette were somehow extraordinary.

I suppose I have become blasé, but plain grated carrots with vinaigrette rather bore me now. I usually perk up the salad with another fruit or vegetable, especially apples and/or zucchini. Sometimes I add a lot of herbs, especially coriander when I have it, or make some fancy sauce with yogurt or orange juice. I'm not sure how French all of this is, but variety is the spice of cooking life. And speaking of spices, cumin is pretty delicious with grated carrots.

One supermarket item that saddens me is ready-made carottes râpées. They just seem like a very depressing thing to buy:

In France, raw carrots are generally eaten in this grated form. When I serve carrot sticks with a dip, whether to my family or friends, the former wolf them down and the latter consider the presentation original and exotic.

Carrots enter into many other French recipes, of course. They are a frequent ingredient in traditional French blended soup, and carottes Vichy, originally made with Vichy mineral water, are a well-known French classic.

Personally, I often toss carrots in with a roasted chicken, include them in about every mixed vegetable dish I make, and occasionally concoct something elegant from them, such as this carrot flan:


However, unlike many of my American expat friends, I have never attempted to make a carrot cake in my French kitchen. But I think if I wanted to get comments about "original" and "exotic" cooking, that would definitely beat carrot sticks!