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Flemish Carrots

Carrots cooked with butter, onion, stock, and seasonings, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Flemish Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Scrape, slice, and cook the carrots in boiling salted water until tender; drain.

Make the dish

  1. Heat the butter in a pan, add the onion, and brown lightly.

  2. Add the carrots and seasoning, shaking well over the heat for ten minutes.

  3. Add the soup stock, cover, and simmer for half an hour.

  4. Stir in the parsley and serve hot.

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. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. White pepper + parsleytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 soften into a tender vegetable.
Butter or fat
Carries flavour and helps the onion brown lightly in the pan.
Onion
Browns lightly in the fat, adding savoury sweetness and aroma.
Soup stock
Adds liquid and savoury flavour as the carrots simmer.

The step that matters

Shaking the carrots over the heat. Tossing the carrots with butter and seasoning for ten minutes lets the surface dry and coat evenly, which helps the seasoning cling and the carrots take on a light glaze instead of steaming soft and watery.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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