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Young Carrots with White Sauce

Young carrots simmered in a white sauce of butter, stock, and egg yolk, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Young Carrots with White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Trim and wash the carrots, then boil them in salted water for 10 minutes.

  2. Strain the carrots in a colander.

Cook the carrots in sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the white stock.

  2. Add the carrots and boil for 15 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and sugar, then boil for another 15 minutes.

  4. Reduce the sauce to a glaze and bind it with the egg yolk.

Serve

  1. Serve the carrots in a dome shape, topped with the sauce and garnished with chopped parsley.

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. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Spring carrots
Provide the main vegetable, which softens during boiling and absorbs the sauce flavour.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded flavour to the sauce.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which reduces to a glaze around the carrots.
Egg yolk
Thickens the reduced sauce and binds it into a smooth, cohesive coating.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the savoury stock and enhances the carrots' natural sweetness.

The step that matters

Reduce the sauce to a glaze and bind it with the egg yolk. If the egg yolk is added to a sauce that is too hot, it can scramble and turn grainy. Reducing first concentrates the flavour, and adding the yolk off the boil or over gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sugar, egg, 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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