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Dessert

Carottes Au Caramel

Carrots cooked with butter, sugar, pepper, salt, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Carottes Au Caramel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the carrots until tender, then cut them into long, thin strips.

Cook

  1. In a frying pan, heat a large lump of butter and drippings until very hot.

  2. Add the carrot strips to the pan, sprinkle with sugar, pepper, and coarse sea salt, then fry until the edges are well browned.

  3. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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, becoming tender after boiling and then browning on the outside.
Sugar
Caramelizes at high heat on the carrot surfaces, adding sweetness and browned flavor.
Butter
Carries heat into the carrots and adds richness and browning to the surface.
Drippings
Add savory fat that tolerates high heat and deepens the flavor of the browned carrots.

The step that matters

Fry until the edges are well browned. Sugar caramelizes and proteins brown only when the pan is very hot and the carrots are dry on the surface. If the pan is not hot enough or is crowded, the carrots steam, turn soft and pale, and the caramelized flavor is lost.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Carrotthe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits less well
  4. Potatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, pepper, 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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