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German Carrots

A carrot side dish cooked with butter, sugar, salt, pepper, parsley, nutmeg, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

German Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Wash the carrots and cook until soft.

  2. Remove the skins and cut the carrots into ½-inch cubes.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, make a sauce with flour, butter, seasoning, and 1½ cups of carrot cooking liquid.

  2. Before serving, sprinkle parsley and nutmeg on top if desired.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Nutmeg + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce that coats the carrots.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, giving it a smoother mouthfeel.
Carrots
Provide the main body, sweetness and texture of the dish.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the savory seasoning.

The step that matters

Make the sauce with flour and butter. Flour must be cooked into the butter before the liquid is added, or the sauce can turn lumpy instead of smooth.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, parsley, sugar, nutmeg, flour):

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Parsnipfits about as well
  3. Carrotthe original
  4. Arrowrootfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, sugar, nutmeg, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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