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Savory Carrots

A side dish of carrots simmered in butter, flour, broth, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot 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 ↓

Savory Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a stew pan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour, parsley, onion, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

  3. Add the sliced carrots and cook gently, shaking the pan frequently, until the mixture is light brown.

  4. Pour in the broth, cover the pan, and simmer until the carrots are very tender.

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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Nutmeg + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the carrots brown lightly in the pan.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid and helps bind the carrots into a light sauce.
Carrots
Provide the main body, sweetness, and texture of the dish.
Broth
Supplies moisture for simmering and carries flavor through the carrots.

The step that matters

Cook the carrots until light brown. Shaking the pan over gentle heat browns the carrots and the flour-butter mixture evenly. Heat that is too high can scorch the flour and make the dish taste bitter.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, parsley, nutmeg, pepper, carrot. 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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