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Sauce

Carrot Sauce

A sauce made by boiling carrot, pickles, and horseradish in brown sauce until the carrot can be beaten to a jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Carrot Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the carrot until it can be beaten to a jelly.

  2. Add the carrot, pickles, and horseradish to the boiling brown sauce.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes, stirring well.

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. Orange + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together737 recipes

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

  2. Horseradish + carrottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together178 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Sauce + horseradishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together775 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Horseradish + orangetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together74 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Sauce + carrottop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,509 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrot
Cooked and beaten to a jelly, it thickens the sauce and adds body and sweetness.
Brown sauce
Forms the base liquid of the sauce and carries the other flavours.
Horseradish
Adds sharp pungency that mellows during boiling.
Pickles
Contribute acidity and tang that balance the sweetness of the carrot.

The step that matters

Boil for 10 minutes, stirring well. Stirring keeps the carrot purée from settling and scorching on the bottom of the pan, so the sauce stays smooth and evenly thickened while the flavours blend.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, horseradish, carrot):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, horseradish, carrot. 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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