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Creamed Carrots

A side dish of boiled carrots simmered in cream, seasoned with salt, pepper, sugar, and parsley.

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

Creamed Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Wash and scrape the carrots.

  2. Boil the carrots until tender, then cut them into small pieces.

Make the creamed carrots

  1. Season the carrots with salt, pepper, and a pinch of sugar.

  2. Sprinkle lightly with flour.

  3. Pour the cream over the carrots and add the minced parsley.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil and serve hot.

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

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

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 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 body of the dish, giving it its sweet, tender texture.
Flour
Lightly thickens the cream so it coats the carrots rather than running off.
Rich cream
Adds richness and body, and thickens further as the mixture comes to a boil.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the natural sweetness of the carrots.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Once the flour is in the cream, heating it to a boil lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce. Boiling too hard or too long can cause the cream to separate or scorch, so keep it steady and watch it closely.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Parsnipfits about as well
  2. Arrowrootfits about as well
  3. Carrotthe original
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sugar, flour, 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.

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