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Carrots and Turnips

A boiled carrot and turnip stew flavored with salt, stock, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Carrots and Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Boil

  1. Boil a saucepan of water and add 2 tablespoons of coarse sea salt to the boiling water.

  2. If using young carrots, add them to the boiling water and cook for 20 minutes, checking tenderness with a fork.

  3. If using old carrots, wash, scrape, and cut them into shapes before boiling them for 30 to 45 minutes.

Glaze and serve

  1. Transfer boiled carrots to a stewpan and cover with good stock.

  2. Add a piece of butter and sprinkle with 2 teaspoons of castor sugar.

  3. Bring to a boil and reduce to a glaze.

  4. Remove from heat and serve.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Carrot + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,083 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + sugartop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,211 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

Carrots or turnips
Provide the main vegetable, becoming tender and soft when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and gloss to the glaze.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the vegetables and helps form a glaze as the liquid reduces.
Good stock
Adds savoury flavour and liquid that reduces to coat the vegetables.

The step that matters

Reducing to a glaze. If the liquid is reduced too far, the sugar and butter can scorch on the pan and turn bitter. Stop when the liquid is syrupy and coats the vegetables.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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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