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Creamed Carrots

A sauce of butter, flour, and cream mixed with boiled carrots, seasoned with salt and pepper, garnished with parsley.

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

Creamed Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and whisk in the flour until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the cream, stirring constantly until thickened.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the diced boiled carrots and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  3. Add chopped parsley before serving.

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

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

  3. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce.
Cream
Forms the body of the sauce and gives it a silky texture.
Boiled carrots
Provide the main vegetable and sweetness, carried in the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the cream while stirring constantly. Adding cream slowly while whisking keeps the flour evenly dispersed, so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps. Dumping it in at once can leave clumps of cooked flour that do not dissolve well.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter, pepper, flour, 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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