The Simple Trick That Makes Vegetables Their Best Selves

When Bee Wilson’s marriage ended after 23 years, the kitchen was one of the few places that made her feel better rather than worse. Putting on a pot of carrots, butter and salt was an easy feat at a time when it was hard just to make it through each day.

Recipe: Butter-Poached Carrots

Now, years later, her two older children have moved out, and it’s just she and her youngest son, Leo, who had always been “a selective eater,” she said over a Zoom call. It’s an old tale in the Wilson household: For Baby Leo, anything green was a no-go, but sugary orange carrots rocked his world. Maybe that’s why the most exciting recipe in her most recent cookbook, “The Secret of Cooking,” is a simple, seemingly nothing, butter-poached carrot. As she explained it, “If daily life is made up of hundreds of meals and sharing them with the people that matter to you, then making slightly disappointing carrots every time you do it is really annoying!”

It doesn’t seem that butter, water and salt should result in carrots that taste this supremely of carrots, but they do. Their flavor is distilled and crystalline; if the color orange had a flavor, this would be it. In the five minutes it takes for the cooking pot — one of humanity’s greatest inventions, Wilson reminded me — to come to a simmer, the water gains the carrots’ sweet, root-vegetable flavor, while also emulsifying the butter into a glossy sauce. These are buttered carrots but poached in their own carotene-rich liqueur, making them the carrotiest carrots you’ll ever taste. But as I’ve learned over the year, this same method can also yield the shallotiest shallots, the mushroomiest mushrooms, the green-beaniest green beans.

According to Raymond Blanc, the French chef from whom Wilson learned the recipe, the genius (and whole point) of this butter-in-a-pot technique is its speed. “Remember, dry heat takes twice longer than wet heat,” he said over the phone from Great Milton, a village in Oxfordshire, England. That little bit of water in the closed pot becomes “steam being more than steam,” a powerful conductor of heat and the best way to maintain the vegetable’s integrity. “Often we murder vegetables by boiling them,” he said, but with this method, which he learned from his mother, a vegetable — any vegetable, really — can be fully itself (color, flavor, texture and even nutrients retained). When I asked him what he calls this magic trick, if not a humbler iteration of beurre fondue or beurre monté, he said, “French family food.” Blanc’s recipe, a mere thumb’s length of text in his cookbook, “Kitchen Secrets,” was a whisper that Wilson leaned in to hear, identified as brilliant and adapted to her own life, with her own pots and her own people. Carrot coins boiled in a closed, pressurized environment with water, butter and salt is, Blanc writes, “a great little secret for cooking vegetables; one that has served me well for many years.”