Name: Boiled Carrots
Ingredients: carrots; coarse sea salt; drawn butter

Why it works: Carrot and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,083 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Carrots

Ingredients

carrots
coarse sea salt
drawn butter

Directions

Prepare

Scrape and slice the carrots.

Cook and serve

Boil the sliced carrots in well salted water until tender, about 1 to 2 hours.
Drain and pour drawn butter over the carrots 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.

Carrot + buttertop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,083 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots: Are the main vegetable, becoming tender and sweet as they cook in salted water.
Drawn butter: Adds richness and a smooth fat coating that carries flavour to the carrots.

“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.