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Creamed Carrots

A side dish of carrots cooked in a butter‑flour‑milk sauce and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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. Use as little water as possible to cook the carrots to retain their sweetness.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, rub together the butter and flour to form a cream.

  2. Pour the boiling milk or thin cream over the butter-flour mixture.

  3. Add the mixture to the carrots and let it boil once.

Serve

  1. Sprinkle chopped parsley over the dish 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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + carrottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor, and with flour forms the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk or cream into a smooth, creamy sauce when cooked.
Milk or thin cream
Forms the liquid of the sauce, giving it body and a soft, creamy texture.
Carrots
Provide the main vegetable, with natural sweetness that the cooking water should preserve.

The step that matters

Use as little water as possible to cook the carrots. Carrots lose sugars and flavor into cooking water that is discarded, so using minimal water keeps their sweetness in the dish.

Swap the carrot

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

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

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