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Carottes Aux Fines Herbes

Carrots cooked with butter, flour, parsley, shallots, stock, and seasonings, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Carottes Aux Fines Herbes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add the flour, chopped parsley, and minced shallots; stir to combine.

  3. Add the carrots and cook gently for a few minutes, stirring occasionally.

  4. Pour in the gravy or stock and season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and lemon juice.

Cook and serve

  1. Cover and simmer until the carrots are tender.

  2. Serve garnished with fried bread.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour of the herbs and shallots.
Flour
Thickens the gravy or stock into a light, coating sauce.
Carrots
Provide the main body, sweetness and texture of the dish.
Gravy or stock
Supplies the liquid that forms the sauce and moistens the carrots.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the butter. Stirring flour into melted butter forms a roux that thickens the liquid smoothly; if the flour is added without stirring it can clump and leave lumps in the sauce.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, parsley, shallot, pepper, nutmeg, lemon. 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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