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Creamed Carrots

A dish of boiled carrots in a butter and flour sauce with milk or cream, finished with parsley.

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

Creamed Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the carrots

  1. Slice the carrots and boil them in salted water until tender, using as little water as possible to retain sweetness.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, rub the butter into the flour until well combined.

  2. Pour the boiling milk or thin cream over the butter-flour mixture and stir until smooth.

  3. Add the mixture to the carrots and bring to a boil.

  4. Sprinkle chopped parsley over the dish 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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 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

New carrots
Provide the main body and natural sweetness of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and combines with flour to start the sauce.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the milk or cream into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Milk or thin cream
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds creaminess.

The step that matters

Boil the carrots in as little water as possible. Using little water keeps the carrots' sugars and flavour concentrated, retaining sweetness. Boiling until just tender avoids mushy carrots.

Swap the carrot

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, 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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