Skip to main content
Main

Carrots with Cream Sauce

A dish of sliced carrots simmered in a butter, sugar, and cream sauce, finished with egg yolks and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Carrots with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the carrots

  1. Peel and slice the carrots into 1/6 inch pieces.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the carrots, water, salt, sugar, and butter.

  3. Cover and cook for about 30 minutes, tossing occasionally.

Finish the cream

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with twice as much cold water as liquid yolks.

  2. Add the cream and the additional butter to the saucepan.

  3. Mix carefully by tossing in the saucepan.

  4. Serve immediately.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Form the bulk of the dish and give it natural sweetness and body as they soften.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the dish when gently heated, giving a creamy set.
Cream
Adds richness and body, softening the texture of the carrots.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the flavor of the carrots.

The step that matters

Cook the carrots covered, tossing occasionally. Covering the pan traps steam so the carrots cook through and soften evenly with the water. Removing the lid or running the heat too high can dry the carrots out or scorch the butter and sugar on the pan base.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, cream, 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes