Skip to main content
Main

Carrots Sliced

Boiled sliced carrots cooked with milk, flour, salt, pepper, and optional parsley.

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

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Slice the carrots and boil them in very little water until tender.

  2. Add the milk, flour, salt, and pepper; stir well.

  3. Garnish with parsley if desired.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  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).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Form the main bulk of the dish and add natural sweetness as they cook.
Milk
Provides the liquid and creamy body of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells with heat, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Add the milk, flour, salt, and pepper; stir well.. Flour clumps when it hits hot liquid unless it is stirred in thoroughly. Stirring disperses the starch evenly so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, milk, flour, pepper):

  1. Cardamomfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Celeryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, milk, flour, pepper. 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