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To Boil Carrots

This dish is boiled carrots prepared with salt and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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To Boil Carrots

Why it works: Chestnut and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 186 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Boil Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the green tops of the carrots and wash them well in cold water.

  2. Scrape the carrots clean with a sharp knife, removing any black specks.

  3. If the carrots are large, cut them in halves or quarters.

Boil and serve

  1. Bring 2 quarts of warm water to a boil in a saucepan.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt.

  3. Add a small piece of baking soda.

  4. Once the water is boiling, add the carrots and boil until tender.

  5. For serving, drain the carrots in a colander and place them on a hot 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Chestnut + carrottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together186 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
The main vegetable; boiling softens its fibres until tender while it keeps its sweetness.
Baking soda
Raises the water's pH, which can help carrots soften more quickly during boiling.

The step that matters

Boiling the carrots until tender. Carrots need to be cooked long enough for heat to soften their dense cell walls, but overcooking leaves them mushy. Checking for tenderness with a knife or fork is the safest way to judge doneness, since cooking time depends on carrot size.

“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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