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Sweet and Sour Carrots

A dish of boiled carrots with raisins, flour, butter, and sugar, simmered in a sweet and sour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sweet and Sour Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Wash and scrape the carrots, then cut them into dice-shaped pieces.

  2. Boil the carrots in water with salt until soft, about 30 minutes.

  3. Add the raisins to the carrots.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the flour with enough vinegar to thin it, then add to the carrots.

  2. Stir in the butter and sugar, and let everything simmer for 15 minutes.

  3. Serve warm.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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
Provide the main body and bulk of the dish as they soften during boiling.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce around the carrots.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture to the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the dish its sour note.

The step that matters

Thinning the flour with vinegar. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps and stays floury. Mixing it first with a little cold vinegar to a smooth paste lets the starch disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens without lumps.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, flour, vinegar, egg, butter, sugar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, flour, vinegar, egg, butter, sugar. 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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