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To Dress Carrots in the German Way

A side dish of boiled carrots tossed with butter, salt, nutmeg, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley 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 ↓

To Dress Carrots in the German Way

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove any black specks from the carrots.

  2. Cut large carrots in half lengthwise into four pieces.

Cook

  1. Boil the carrots in salted water until tender, about 1 to 2 hours for large carrots and 1 hour for young ones.

  2. Drain the carrots.

Dress and serve

  1. Toss the carrots with butter, salt, nutmeg, and parsley.

  2. Serve very hot as a side dish.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Form the main body of the dish and become tender through boiling.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the carrots with a silky flavor.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic note that complements the sweetness of the carrots.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, butter, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, butter, parsley. 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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