Skip to main content
Main

Roasted Carrots

Roasted carrots simmered in a butter or oil and flour roux, finished with 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 ↓

Roasted Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Wash, scrape, and cut the carrots lengthwise into halves and quarters, then crosswise into 1-inch pieces.

  2. Cover the carrots with boiling water and cook for 10 to 15 minutes with a little salt.

  3. Drain the water (reserve for soups).

Roast and serve

  1. In a pan, brown some fat and flour, then add soup stock or the reserved water.

  2. Roast the carrots in the mixture until done, covering tightly and adding more liquid if necessary.

  3. Flavor with chopped parsley before serving.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 and provide sweetness and a tender texture when cooked.
Fat
Carries flavor and helps the browned flour build a richer, toasty base.
Flour
Browns with the fat to thicken the cooking liquid into a light sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the fat and flour. Cooking the flour in fat until nutty and golden builds flavor and removes raw starch taste. Adding liquid too early or too pale a roux leaves the sauce bland and pasty.

Swap the carrot

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes