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Stewed Carrots and Rice

A stew of carrots simmered with stock, sugar, salt, and cornflour, served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Stewed Carrots and Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Scrape the carrots and place them in a pan of cold water.

  2. Bring the water to a boil.

  3. Remove the carrots from the boiling water.

  4. Rub the carrots with a coarse towel.

  5. Cut the carrots into neat pieces.

Stew and thicken

  1. Return the carrots to the pan with the stock, sugar, pepper, and salt.

  2. Stew slowly for 1 hour.

  3. Moisten the cornflour with a little water.

  4. Add the parsley to the mixture.

  5. Pour the mixture among the carrots and stir until it thickens.

Serve

  1. Prepare a dish with a border of rice.

  2. Pile the carrots in the center.

  3. Pour the sauce over the carrots.

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 + sugartop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,211 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + parsleytop 39% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,535 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Main vegetable; slow stewing softens them while they keep their shape in the dish.
Stock
Provides the liquid for stewing and forms the base of the sauce.
Cornflour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a glossy sauce when stirred in and heated.
Sugar
Adds gentle sweetness that balances the savory stock and salt.

The step that matters

Stir the cornflour mixture until it thickens. Cornflour must be moistened first so it does not clump, then heated with stirring so its starch swells and thickens the sauce evenly.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, 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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