Skip to main content
Main

Pot Au Feu

A vegetable stew of onion, carrot, turnip, and rice, finished with nut milk and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pot Au Feu

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Roast the onion

  1. Slice onion and place on an oiled baking sheet. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until rich brown.

  2. Transfer onion to a stew pan. Add sliced carrot and turnip, cook for one hour.

Cook and finish

  1. Stir in rice, cook for an additional hour.

  2. Press mixture through a sieve, return to stove.

  3. Add nut milk to achieve desired consistency, season with salt to taste.

  4. Burn a little brown sugar, stir into pot just 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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

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

  5. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Browns in the oven, building deep, roasted sweetness and color for the base.
Carrot
Softens during long cooking, adding natural sweetness and body to the pot.
Turnip
Softens during long cooking, adding body and a mild, earthy flavor.
Rice
Breaks down during cooking and, once sieved, thickens the mixture into a smooth base.
Nut milk
Adds moisture and creaminess, letting the cook adjust the final consistency.
Brown sugar
Burned to a caramel, adds bittersweet aroma and deep color to the finished pot.

The step that matters

Bake the onion until rich brown. Onion color comes from Maillard browning and caramelization of its sugars. Stopping too early leaves a pale, flat flavor, while over-baking turns it bitter and acrid, which carries into the whole pot.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, rice, milk, 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesSteamed RiceSteamed Rice48 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipes