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Carrots Pickled

A simple pickled carrot recipe using boiling water, vinegar, salt, cloves, and bay leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,873 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Carrots Pickled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Trim the carrots and parboil them for 2 minutes, then peel them.

  2. Place the carrots in a saucepan with boiling water lightly salted and cook until nearly done.

  3. Drain the carrots and transfer them to earthen jars, covering them with cold boiled vinegar.

  4. Let the carrots sit overnight.

Pickle and store

  1. Draw off the vinegar and boil it with a little salt.

  2. Place the carrots in a 2-quart jar and pour the cooled vinegar over them to cover.

  3. Add the cloves and bay leaves, cover the jar tightly, and store in a cool place.

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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Vinegar + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Carrot + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,892 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Small young carrots
Form the main body of the pickle, taking up the vinegar and keeping a firm, crisp bite when parboiled.
Cold boiled vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the carrots and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water and the boiled vinegar, adding savoury depth to the carrots.

The step that matters

Cooking the carrots until nearly done. Cooking too long softens the carrots past the firm, crisp texture pickling relies on, while undercooking leaves them raw and less able to absorb the vinegar.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, clove):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, clove. 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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